My Lords, with regard to the bribe for the entertainment, I only beg leave to make one observation to you upon that article.  I could say, if the time would admit it, a great deal upon that subject; but I wish to compress it, and I shall therefore only recommend it in general to your Lordships’ deliberate consideration.  The covenant subsisting between the Company and its servants was made for the express purpose of putting an end to all such entertainments.  By this convention it is ordered that no presents exceeding 200_l._ [400_l._?] shall be accepted upon any pretence for an entertainment.  The covenant was intended to put an end to the custom of receiving money for entertainments, even when visiting an independent Oriental prince.  But your Lordships know that the Nabob was no prince, but a poor, miserable, undone dependant upon, the Company.  The present was also taken by Mr. Hastings at a time when he went upon the cruel commission of cutting down the Nabob’s allowance from 400,000_l._ to 260,000_l._ [160,000_l._?], and when he was reducing to beggary thousands of persons who were dependent for bread upon the Nabob, and ruining, perhaps, forty thousand others.  I shall say no more upon that subject, though, in truth, it is a thing upon which much observation might be made.

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I shall now pass on to another article connected with, though not making a direct part of, that of corrupt bribery:  I mean the swindling subterfuges by which he has attempted to justify his corrupt practices.  At one time, he defends them by pleading the necessities of his own affairs,—­as when he takes presents and entertainments avowedly for his own profits.  At another time he defends them by pleading the goodness of his intentions:  he intended, he says, to give the money to the Company.  His last plea has something in it (which shall I say?) of a more awful or of a more abandoned character, or of both.  In the settlement of his public account, before he left India, he takes credit for a bond which he had received from Nobkissin upon some account or other.  He then, returns to England, and what does he do?  Pay off?  No.  Give up the bond to the Company?  No.  He says, “I will account to the Company for this money.”  And when he comes to give this account of the expenditure of this money, your Lordships will not be a little astonished at the items of it.  One is for founding a Mahometan college.  It is a very strange thing that Rajah Nobkissin, who is a Gentoo, should be employed by Mr. Hastings to found a Mahometan college.  We will allow Mr. Hastings, who is a Christian, or would be thought a Christian, to grow pious at last, and, as many others have done, who have spent their lives in fraud, rapacity, and peculation, to seek amends and to expiate his crimes by charitable foundations.  Nay, we will suppose Mr. Hastings to have taken it into his head to turn Mahometan, (Gentoo he could not,) and to have designed by a Mahometan foundation to expiate his offences.  Be it so; but why should Nobkissin pay for it?  We will pass over this also.  But when your Lordships shall hear of what nature that foundation was, I believe you will allow that a more extraordinary history never did appear in the world.