offence in my report of the original transaction, | employed against Madajee Scindia, under the

than as expressive of any want of a further elucidation of it.

I will now endeavour to reply to the different questions, which have been stated to me, in as explicit a manner as I am able. To such information as I can give, the honourable court is fully entitled, and where that shall prove defective I will point out the easy means, by which it may be rendered more complete.

command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly apprized the court of directors, in my letter of the 29th November 1780. The other two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be made publick, though intended for publick service, and actually applied to it. The exigencies of the government were at that time my own, and every pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind. Wherever I could find allowable means of reneither could it occur to me as necessary to state on our proceedings every little aid, which I could thus procure, nor do I know how I could have stated it, without appearing to court favour by an ostentation, which I disdain, nor without the chance of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by the constructive assertion of a separate and unparticipated merit, derived from the influence of my station, to which they might have laid an equal claim. I should have deemed it particularly dishonourable to receive for my own use money tendered by men of a certain class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiours, and bound them by oath not to receive them. I was therefore more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it, which would scarcely have failed to light upon me, had I suffered the money to be brought directly to my own house, or to that of any person known to be in trust for me; for these reasons I caused it to be transported immediately to the treasury. There, you well know, Sir, it could not be received without being passed to some credit, and this could only be done by entering it as a loan, or as a deposit; the first was the least liable to reflection, and therefore I had obviously recourse to it. Why the second sum was entered as a deposit, I am utterly ignorant; pos sibly it was done without any special direction from me; possibly because it was the simplest mode of entry, and therefore preferred, as the transaction itself did not require concealment, having been already avowed.

First, I believe I can affirm with certainty, that the several sums mentioned in the account trans-lieving those wants, I eagerly seized them; but mitted with my letter, above mentioned, were received at or within a very few days of the dates, which are prefixed to them in the account; but as this contains only the gross sums, and each of these was received in different payments, though at no great distance of time, I cannot therefore assign a greater degree of accuracy to the account. Perhaps the honourable court will judge this sufficient for any purpose, to which their enquiry was directed; but if it should not be so, I will beg leave to refer for a more minute information, and for the means of making any investigation, which they may think it proper to direct, respecting the particulars of this transaction, to Mr. Larkins, your accomptant-general, who was privy to every process of it, and possesses, as I believe, the original paper, which contained the only account, that I ever kept of it. In this each receipt was, as I recollect, specifically inserted, with the name of the person by whom it was made; and I shall write to him to desire, that he will furnish you with the paper itself, if it is still in being, and in his hands, or with whatever he can distinctly recollect concerning it.

For my motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the council, or of the court of directors, and for taking bonds for part of these sums, and paying others into the treasury as deposits on my own account, I have generally accounted in my letter to the honourable the court of directors of the 22d May 1782; namely, that "I either chose to con"ceal the first receipts from publick curiosity, "by receiving bonds for the amount, or possibly acted without any studied design, which my memory, at that distance of time, could verify; and that I did not think it worth my 66 care to observe the same means with the "rest."-It will not be expected, that I should be able to give a more correct explanation of my intentions after a lapse of three years, having declared at the time, that many particulars had escaped my remembrance; neither shall I attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied in that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily, or with a strong probability, follow them. I have said, that the three first sums of the account were paid into the company's treasury without passing through my hands. The second of these was forced into notice by its destination and application to the expence of a detachment, which was formed and

Although I am firmly persuaded, that these were my sentiments on the occasion, yet I will not affirm that they were. Though I feel their impression as the remains of a series of thoughts retained on my memory, I am not certain, that they may not have been produced by subsequent reflection on the principal fact, combining with t the probable motives of it. Of this I am certain. that it was my design originally to have concealed the receipt of all the sums, except the second, even from the knowledge of the court of direc tors. They had answered my purpose of publick utility, and I had almost totally dismissed them from my remembrance. But when fortune threw a cum in my way of a magnitude, which could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy of my situation at the time, in which I received it, made me more circumspect of appearances, I chose to apprize my employers of it, which I did hastily

|

and generally; hastily, perhaps to prevent the
vigilance and activity of secret calumny; and
generally, because I knew not the exact amount of
the sum, of which I was in the receipt, but not in
the full possession: I promised to acquaint them
with the result as soon as I should be in possession
of it, and in the performance of my promise II
thought it consistent with it to add to the account
all the former appropriations of the same kind;
my good genius then suggesting to me, with a
spirit of caution, which might have spared me the
trouble of this apology, had I universally attended
to it, that if I had suppressed them, and they were
afterwards known, I might be asked, what were
my motives for withholding part of these receipts
from the knowledge of the court of directors, and
informing them of the rest.

dency, in the middle of the year 1781, in order to guard against their becoming a claim on the company, as part of my estate, in the event of my death occurring in the course of the service, on which I was then entering.

This, Sir, is the plain history of the transaction. should be ashamed to request, that you would communicate it to the honourable court of directors, whose time is too valuable for the intrusion of a subject so uninteresting, but that it is become a point of indispensable duty; I must therefore request the favour of you to lay it, at a convenient time, before them. In addressing it to you personally, I yield to my own feelings of the respect, which is due to them as a body, and to the assurances, which I derive from your experienced civilities, that you will kindly overlook the trouble imposed by it. I have the honour to be, Sir, Your very humble and

It being my wish to clear up every doubt upon this transaction, which either my own mind could suggest, or which may have been suggested by others, I beg leave to suppose another question, and to state the terms of it in my reply, by informing you, that the endorsement on the bonds was made about the period of my leaving the presi- | 11th July 1785.

Cheltenham,

most obedient servant, (Signed) WARREN HASTINGS.

LETTER TO WILLIAM ELLIOT, ESQ.

OCCASIONED

BY THE ACCOUNT GIVEN IN A NEWSPAPER

THE SPEECH MADE IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS,

THE **** OF

IN THE DEBATE CONCERNING LORD FITZWILLIAM.

1795.

Beaconsfield, May 26, 1795. | (as I hear he did, in three or four speeches made

sad draught had been farther infected with the gaol pollution of the Old Bailey, and was dashed and brewed, and ineffectually stummed again into a senatorial exordium in the house of lords, I found all the high flavour and mantling of my honours, tasteless, flat, and stale. Unluckily, the new tax on wine is felt even in the greatest fortunes, and his Grace submits to take up with the heel-taps of Mr. Erskine.

me.

66

His Grace, like an able orator, as he is, begins
with giving me a great deal of praise for talents
which I do not possess. He does this to intitle
himself, on the credit of this gratuitous kindness,
to exaggerate my abuse of the parts which his
bounty, and not that of nature, has bestowed upon
In this, too, he has condescended to copy
Mr. Erskine. These priests (I hope they will
excuse me; I mean priests of the rights of man)
begin by crowning me with their flowers and their
fillets, and bedewing me with their odours, as a
preface to the knocking me on the head with
their consecrated axes. I have injured, say they,
the constitution; and I have abandoned the Whig
party and the Whig principles that I professed. I
do not mean, my dear sir, to defend myself against
his Grace. I have not much interest in what the
world an interest in what I shall think or say of
any one in it; and I wish that his Grace had suf-
fered an unhappy man to enjoy, in his retreat, the
melancholy privileges of obscurity and sorrow. At
any rate, I have spoken, and I have written, on the
subject. If I have written or spoken so poorly as
to be quite forgot, a fresh apology will not make
a more lasting impression. "I must let the tree lie
as it falls." Perhaps I must take some shame to
myself. I confess that I have acted on my own
principles of government, and not on those of his
Grace, which are, I dare say, profound and wise;
but which I do not pretend to understand. As to
the party to which he alludes, and which has long
taken its leave of me, I believe the principles
of the book which he condemns are very con-
formable to the opinions of many of the most
considerable and most grave in that description of
politicians. A few indeed, who, I admit, are equally
respectable in all points, differ from me, and talk
his Grace's language. I am too feeble to contend
with them. They have the field to themselves.
There are others, very young and very ingenious
persons, who form, probably, the largest part of
what his Grace, I believe, is pleased to consider
as that party. Some of them were not born into
the world, and all of them were children, when I
entered into that connexion. I give due credit to
the censorial brow, to the broad phylacteries, and
to the imposing gravity, of those magisterial rab-
bins and doctors in the cabala of political science.
I admit that "wisdom is as the grey hair to man,
" and that learning is like honourable old age.'
But, at a time when liberty is a good deal talked
of, perhaps I might be excused, if I caught some-
thing of the general indocility. It might not be
surprising, if I lengthened my chain a link or two,
and, in an age of relaxed discipline, gave a trifling
indulgence to my own notions. If that could be
allowed, perhaps I might sometimes (by accident,
and without an unpardonable crime) trust as much
to my own very careful, and very laborious,
though, perhaps, somewhat purblind disquisitions,
as to their soaring, intuitive, eagle-eyed autho-
rity. But the modern liberty is a precious thing.

I have had the ill or good fortune to provoke
two great men of this age to the publication of
their opinions; I mean, citizen Thomas Paine,
and his Grace the **** of *******. I am not so
great a leveller as to put these two great men on
a par, either in the state, or the republick of let-
ters: but, "the field of glory is a field for all."
It is a large one indeed, and we all may run, God
knows where, in chase of glory, over the bound-world shall think or say of me; as little has the
less expanse of that wild heath, whose horizon
always flies before us. I assure his Grace (if he
will yet give me leave to call him so) whatever
may be said on the authority of the clubs, or of
the bar, that citizen Paine (who, they will have
it, hunts with me in couples, and who only moves
as I drag him along) has a sufficient activity in
his own native benevolence to dispose and enable
him to take the lead for himself. He is ready to
blaspheme his God, to insult his king, and to libel
the constitution of his country, without any pro-
vocation from me, or any encouragement from his
Grace. I assure him, that I shall not be guilty of
the injustice of charging Mr. Paine's next work
against religion and human society, upon his
Grace's excellent speech in the house of lords. I
farther assure this noble duke, that I neither
encouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to
seek for plenty, liberty, safety, justice, or lenity, in
the famine, in the prisons, in the decrees of con-
vention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in the
guillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up
with what he could find in the glutted markets,
the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy Old Bailey
judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory
of Old England. The choice of country was his
The writings were the effects of his
own zeal. In spite of his friend Dr. Priestley, he
was a free agent. I admit, indeed, that my praises
of the British government, loaded with all its in-
cumbrances; clogged with its peers and its beef;
its parsons and its pudding; its commons and its
beer; and its dull slavish liberty of going about
just as one pleases; had something to provoke a
jockey of Norfolk, who was inspired with the
resolute ambition of becoming a citizen of France,
to do something which might render him worthy
of naturalization in that grand asylum of persecut-
ed merit; something which should intitle him to a
place in the senate of the adoptive country of all
the gallant, generous, and humane. This, I say,
was possible. But the truth is, (with great defer-
ence to his Grace I say it,) citizen Paine acted with-
out any provocation at all; he acted solely from
the native impulses of his own excellent heart.

own taste.

• Mr. Paine is a Norfolk man, from Thetford. VOL. II.

R

It must not be profaned by too vulgar an use. It belongs only to the chosen few, who are born to the hereditary representation of the whole democracy, and who leave nothing at all, no, not the offal, to us poor outcasts of the plebeian race.

poor, puny, private sophist, was defending the declaration of Pilnitz, his majesty might refute me by the treaty of Basle. Such a monarch may destroy one republick because it had a king at its head, and he may balance this extraordinary act Amongst those gentlemen who came to autho- by founding another republick that has cut off the rity, as soon, or sooner than they came of age, I head of its king. I defended that great potentate do not mean to include his Grace. With all those for associating in a grand alliance for the preservanative titles to empire over our minds which dis- tion of the old governments of Europe; but he tinguish the others, he has a large share of expe- puts me to silence by delivering up all those gorience. He certainly ought to understand the vernments (his own virtually included) to the new British constitution better than I do. He has system of France. If he is accused before the studied it in the fundamental part. For one elec- Parisian tribunal (constituted for the trial of kings) tion I have seen, he has been concerned in twenty. for having polluted the soil of liberty by the tracks Nobody is less of a visionary theorist; nobody has of his disciplined slaves, he clears himself by surdrawn his speculations more from practice. No rendering the finest parts of Germany (with a peer has condescended to superintend with more handsome cut of his own territories) to the offended vigilance the declining franchises of the poor com- majesty of the regicides of France. Can I resist mons. "With thrice great Hermes he has out- this? Am I responsible for it, if, with a torch in ، watched the bear.” Often have his candles been | his hand, and a rope about his neck, he makes burned to the snuff, and glimmered and stunk in amende honorable to the Sans-Culotterie of the the sockets, whilst he grew pale at his constitutional republick one and indivisible? In that humiliatstudies; long sleepless nights has he wasted; ing attitude, in spite of my protests, he may supplilong, laborious, shiftless journies has he made, and cate pardon for his menacing proclamations; and, great sums has he expended, in order to secure as an expiation to those whom he failed to terrify the purity, the independence, and the sobriety of with his threats, he may abandon those whom he elections, and to give a check, if possible, to the had seduced by his promises. He may sacrifice ruinous charges that go nearly to the destruction the royalists of France whom he had called to his of the right of election itself. standard, as a salutary example to those who shall adhere to their native sovereign, or shall confide in any other who undertakes the cause of oppressed kings and of loyal subjects.

Amidst these his labours, his Grace will be pleased to forgive me, if my zeal, less enlightened to be sure than his by midnight lamps and studies, has presumed to talk too, favourably of this constitution, and even to say something sounding like approbation of that body which has the honour to reckon his Grace at the head of it. Those, who | dislike this partiality, or, if his Grace pleases, this flattery of mine, have a comfort at hand. I may be refuted and brought to shame by the most convincing of all refutations, a practical refutation. Every individual peer for himself may shew that I was ridiculously wrong: the whole body of those noble persons may refute me for the whole corps. If they please, they are more powerful advocates against themselves, than a thousand scribblers like me can be in their favour. If I were even possessed of those powers which his Grace, in order to heighten my offence, is pleased to attribute to me, there would be little difference. The eloquence of Mr. Erskine might save Mr. **** from the gal- | lows, but no eloquence could save Mr. Jackson from the effects of his own potion.

In that unfortunate book of mine, which is put in the index expurgatorius of the modern Whigs, I might have spoken too favourably not only of those who wear coronets, but of those who wear crowns. Kings, however, have not only long arms, but strong ones too. A great northern potentate, for instance, is able in one moment, and with one bold stroke of his diplomatick pen, to efface all the volumes which I could write in a century, or which the most laborious publicists of Germany ever carried to the fair of Leipsick, as an apology for monarchs and monarchy. Whilst I, or any other

How can I help it, if this high-minded prince will subscribe to the invectives which the regicides have made against all kings, and particularly against himself ? How can I help it, if this royal propagandist will preach the doctrine of the rights of men? Is it my fault if his professors of literature read lectures on that code in all his academies, and if all the pensioned managers of the newspapers in his dominions diffuse it throughout Europe in an hundred journals? Can it be attributed to me, if he will initiate all his grenadiers, and all his hussars, in these high mysteries' Am I responsible, if he will make le droit de l'homme, or la souveraineté du peuple, the favourite parole of his military orders? Now that his troops are to act with the brave legions of freedom, no doubt he will fit them for their fraternity. He will teach the Prussians to think, to feel, and to art, like them, and to emulate the glories of the regi ment de l'échaffaut. He will employ the illus trious citizen Santerre, the general of his new allies, to instruct the dull Germans how they shall conduct themselves towards persons who, like Louis the XVIth, (whose cause and person he once took into his protection,) shall dare, without the sanction of the people, or with it, to consider themselves as hereditary kings. Can I arrest this great potentate in his career of glory? Am I blamable in recommending virtue and religion as the true foundation of all monarchies, because the protector of the three religions of the Westphalian arrangement, to ingratiate himself