coincident with mine; notwithstanding which, your dependants and people, actuated by selfish and avaricious views, have by their interference so impeded the business as to throw the whole country into a state of confusion, from which nothing can retrieve it but an unlimited power lodged in the hands of the superintendent.  I therefore request that your Excellency will give the strictest injunctions to all your dependants not to interfere in any manner with any matter relative to the affairs of the adawlut and foujdarry, and that you will yourself relinquish all interference therein, and leave them entirely to the management of Sudder ul Huk Khan.  This is absolutely necessary to restore the country to a state of tranquillity; and if your Excellency has any plan to propose for the management of the affairs in future, be pleased to communicate it to me, and every attention shall be paid to give your Excellency satisfaction.”

My Lords, I think I have read enough to you for our present purpose,—­referring your Lordships for fuller information to your Minutes, page 1086, which I beg you to read with the greatest attention.

I must again beg your Lordships to remark, that, though Mr. Hastings has the impudence still to pretend that he wishes for the restoration of order and justice in the country, yet, instead of writing to Munny Begum upon the business, whom he knew to be the very object complained of, and whose eunuchs are expressly mentioned in the complaint, he writes to the Nabob, whom he knew to be a pageant in his own court and government, and whose name was not even mentioned in this last complaint.  Not one word is said, even in this letter to the Nabob, of Munny Begum or of her eunuchs.  My Lords, when you consider his tacit support of the authors of the grievance, and his ostensible application for redress to the man who he knew never authorized and could not redress the grievance, you must conclude that he meant to keep the country in the same state for his own corrupt purposes.  In this state the country in fact continued; Munny Begum and her eunuchs continued to administer and squander the Company’s money, as well as the Nabob’s; robberies and murders continued to prevail throughout the country.  No appearance was left of order, law, or justice, from one end of Bengal to the other.

The account of this state of things was received by the Court of Directors with horror and indignation.  On the 27th of May, 1779, they write, as you will find in page 1063 of your printed Minutes, a letter to their government at Calcutta, condemning their proceedings and the removal of Mahomed Reza Khan, and they order that Munny Begum shall be displaced, and Mahomed Reza Khan restored again to the seat of justice.