“8.  Juggut Seet expressly declared in his narrative, that the sum which he agreed to pay the deputation, amounting to 125,000 rupees, was extorted by menaces; and since the close of our inquiry, and the opinions we delivered in the Proceedings of the 21st of June, it fully appears that the presents from the Nabob and Mahomed Reza Khan, exceeding the immense sum of seventeen lacs, were not the voluntary offerings of gratitude, but contributions levied on the weakness of the government, and violently exacted from the dependent state and timid disposition of the minister.  The charge, indeed, is denied on the one hand, as well as affirmed on the other.  Your honorable board must therefore determine how far the circumstance of extortion may aggravate the crime of disobedience to your positive orders,—­the exposing the government in a manner to sale, and receiving the infamous wages of corruption from opposite parties and contending interests.  We speak with boldness, because we speak from conviction founded upon indubitable evidence, that, besides the above sums specified in the distribution account, to the amount of 228,125_l._ sterling, there was likewise to the value of several lacs of rupees procured from Nundcomar and Roy Dullub, each of whom aspired at and obtained a promise of that very employment it was predetermined to bestow on Mahomed Reza Khan.

        (Signed at the end,)
        “CLIVE. 
        W^M B. SUMNER. 
        JOHN CARNAC. 
        H. VERELST.
        FRA^S SYKES.”

My Lords, the persons who sign this letter are mostly the friends, and one of them is the gentleman who is bail for and sits near Mr. Hastings.  They state to you this horrible and venal transaction, by which the government was set to sale, by which a bastard son was elevated to the wrong of the natural and legitimate heir, and in which a prostitute, his mother, was put in the place of the honorable and legitimate mother of the representative of the family.

Now, if there was one thing more than another under heaven, which Mr. Hastings ought to have shunned, it was the suspicion of being concerned in any such infamous transaction as that which is here recorded to be so,—­a transaction in which the country government had before been sold to this very woman and her offspring, and in which two great candidates for power in that country fought against each other, and perhaps the largest offerer carried it.

When a Governor-General sees the traces of corruption in the conduct of his predecessors, the traces of injustice following that corruption, the traces of notorious irregularity in setting aside the just claimants in favor of those that have no claim at all, he has that before his eyes which ought to have made him the more scrupulously avoid, and to keep at the farthest distance possible from, the contagion and even the suspicion of being corrupted by it.  Moreover, my Lords, it was in consequence of these very transactions