principles of Mr. Hastings tend entirely to destroy the character and functions of a council, and to vest them in one of the dissentient members.  The law has placed the sense of the whole in the majority; and it is not a thing to be suffered, that any of the members should privately raise money for the avowed purpose of defeating that sense, or for promoting designs that are contrary to it:  a more alarming assumption of power in an individual member of any deliberative or executive body cannot be imagined.  Mr. Hastings had no right, in order to clear himself of peculation, to criminate the majority with faction.  No member of any body, outvoted on a question, has, or can have, a right to direct any part of his public conduct by that principle.  The members of the Council had a common superior, to whom they might appeal in their mutual charges of faction:  they did so frequently; and the imputation of faction has almost always been laid on Mr. Hastings himself.

But there were periods, very distinguished periods too, in the records of the Company, in which the clandestine taking of money could not be supported even by this pretence.  Mr. Hastings has been charged with various acts of peculation, perpetrated at a time he could not excuse himself by the plea of any public purpose to be carried on, or of any faction in council by which it was traversed.  It may be necessary here to recall to the recollection of the House, that, on the cry which prevailed of the ill practices of the Company’s servants in India, (which general cry in a great measure produced the Regulating Act of 1773,) the Court of Directors, in their instructions of the 29th of March, 1774, gave it as an injunction to the Council-General, that “they immediately cause the strictest inquiry to be made into all oppressions which may have been committed either against natives or Europeans, and into all abuses which may have prevailed in the collection of the revenues or any part of the civil government of the Presidency; and that you communicate to us all information which you may be able to obtain relative thereto, or any embezzlement or dissipation of the Company’s money.”

In this inquiry, by far the most important abuse which appeared on any of the above heads was that which was charged relative to the sale in gross by Mr. Hastings of nothing less than the whole authority of the country government in the disposal of the guardianship of the Nabob of Bengal.

The present Nabob, Mobarek ul Dowlah, was a minor when he succeeded to the title and office of Subahdar of the three provinces in 1770.  Although in a state approaching to subjection, still his rank and character were important.  Much was necessarily to depend upon a person who was to preserve the moderation of a sovereign not supported by intrinsic power, and yet to maintain the dignity necessary to carry on the representation of political government, as well