Thus he begins with the general principle of connivance; he directly avows he does it for a political purpose; and when the Company directs he shall proceed in the suits, instead of deferring to their judgment, he takes the judgment on himself, and says theirs is untenable; he directly discharges the prosecutions of the Company, supersedes the authority of his masters, and gives a general release to all the persons who were still suffering by the feeble footsteps of justice in that country.  He gave them an act of indemnity, and that was the last of his acts.

Now, when I show the consequence of his bribery, the presumptions that arise from his own bribes, his attention to secure others from the punishment of theirs, and, when ordered to carry on a suit, his discharging it,—­when we see all this, can we avoid judging and forming our opinions upon two grand points:  first, that no man would proceed in that universal patronage of guilt, unless he was guilty himself; next, that, by a universal connivance for fourteen years, he is himself the cause and mainspring of all the evils, calamities, extortion, and bribery, that have prevailed and ravaged that country for so long a time?  There is, indeed, no doubt either of his guilt, or of the consequences of it, by which he has extinguished the last expiring hope and glimpse that remained of procuring a remedy for India of the evils that exist in it.

I would mention, that, as a sort of postscript, when he could no longer put the government into the hands of that infamous woman, Munny Begum, he sent an amorous, sentimental letter to the Company, describing her miserable situation, and advising the Company to give her a pension of seventy-two thousand rupees a year, to maintain her.  He describes her situation in such a moving way as must melt every heart.  He supposes her to be reduced to want by the cruel orders of the Company, who retain from her money which they were never obliged to give her.  This representation, which he makes with as much fairness as he represents himself to be in a state of the most miserable poverty and distress, he alone made to the Company, because his colleagues would not countenance him in it; and we find, upon looking over Lord Cornwallis’s last examination into the whole state of this unhappy family, that this woman was able to lend to Mobarek ul Dowlah twenty thousand pounds.  Mr. Hastings, however, could not avoid making this representation; because he knew, that, if he quitted the country without securing that woman, by giving her a hope that she could procure by his credit here that money which by his authority he had before procured for her, she might then make a discovery of all the corruption that had been carried on between them; and therefore he squanders away the treasures of the Company, in order to secure himself from any such detection, and to procure for himself razinamas and all those fine things.  He knew that Munny Begum, that the