The Directors did wrong in their orders to appropriate money, which they must know could not have been acquired by the consent of the pretended donor, to their own use.[42] They acted more properly in refusing to confirm this grant to Mr. Hastings, and in choosing rather to refer him to the law which he had violated than to his own sense of what he thought he was entitled to take from the natives:  putting him in mind that the Regulating Act had expressly declared “that no Governor-General, or any of the Council, shall, directly or indirectly, accept, receive, or take, of or from any person or persons, or on any account whatsoever, any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward, pecuniary or otherwise, or any promise or engagement for any of the aforesaid.”  Here is no reserve for the case of a disclosure to the Directors, and for the legalizing the breach of an act of Parliament by their subsequent consent.  The illegality attached to the action at its very commencement, and it could never be afterwards legalized:  the Directors had no such power reserved to them.  Words cannot be devised of a stronger import or studied with more care.  To these words of the act are opposed the declaration and conduct of Mr. Hastings, who, in his letter of January, 1782, thinks fit to declare, that “an offer of a very considerable sum of money was made to him, both on the part of the Nabob and his ministers, as a present, which he accepted without hesitation.”  The plea of his pretended necessity is of no avail.  The present was not in ready money, nor, as your Committee conceive, applicable to his immediate necessities.  Even his credit was not bettered by bills at long periods; he does not pretend that he raised any money upon them; nor is it conceivable that a banker at Benares would be more willing to honor the drafts of so miserable, undone, and dependent a person as the Nabob of Oude than those of the Governor-General of Bengal, which might be paid either on the receipt of the Benares revenue, or at the seat of his power, and of the Company’s exchequer.  Besides, it is not explicable, upon any grounds that can be avowed, why the Nabob, who could afford to give these bills as a present to Mr. Hastings, could not have equally given them in discharge of the debt which he owed to the Company.  It is, indeed, very much to be feared that the people of India find it sometimes turn more to their account to give presents to the English in authority than to pay their debts to the public; and this is a matter of a very serious consideration.

No small merit is made by Mr. Hastings, and that, too, in a high and upbraiding style, of his having come to a voluntary discovery of this and other unlawful practices of the same kind.  “That honorable court,” says Mr. Hastings, addressing himself to his masters, in his letter of December, 1782, “ought to know whether I possess the integrity and honor which are the first requisites of such a station.