As to the first of these extraordinary positions, your Committee cannot conceive what motive could actuate any native of India dependent on the Company, in assisting them privately, and in refusing to assist them publicly.  If the transaction was fair and honest, every native must have been desirous of making merit with the great governing power.  If he gave his money as a free gift, he might value himself upon very honorable and very acceptable service; if he lent it on the Company’s bonds, it would still have been of service, and he might also receive eight per cent for his money.  No native could, without some interested view, give to the Governor-General what he would refuse to the Company as a grant, or even as a loan.  It is plain that the powers of government must, in some way or other, be understood by the natives to be at sale.  The Governor-General says that he took the money with an original destination to the purposes to which he asserts he has since applied it.  But this original destination was in his own mind only,—­not declared, nor by him pretended to be declared, to the party who gave the presents, and who could perceive nothing in it but money paid to the supreme magistrate for his private emolument.  All that the natives could possibly perceive in such a transaction must be highly dishonorable to the Company’s government; for they must conceive, when they gave money to Mr. Hastings, that they bought from Mr. Hastings either what was their own right or something that was not so, or that they redeemed themselves from some acts of rigor inflicted, threatened, or apprehended.  If, in the first case, Mr. Hastings gave them the object for which they bargained, his act, however proper, was corrupt,—­if he did not, it was both corrupt and fraudulent; if the money was extorted by force or threats, it was oppressive and tyrannical.  The very nature of such transactions has a tendency to teach the natives to pay a corrupt court to the servants of the Company; and they must thereby be rendered less willing, or less able, or perhaps both, to fulfil their engagements to the state.  Mr. Scott’s evidence asserts that they would rather give to Mr. Hastings than lend to the Company.  It is very probable; but it is a demonstration of their opinion of his power and corruption, and of the weak and precarious state of the Company’s authority.

The second principle assumed by Mr. Hastings for his justification, namely, that factious opposition and a divided government might create exigencies requiring such supplies, is full as dangerous as the first; for, if, in the divisions which must arise in all councils, one member of government, when he thinks others factiously disposed, shall be entitled to take money privately from the subject for the purposes of his politics, and thereby to dispense with an act of Parliament, pretences for that end cannot be wanting.  A dispute may always be raised in council in order to cover oppression and peculation elsewhere.  But these