Controul, besides allowing Major Hart to hold
private grain, and therefore to reap the attendant profit on it _with
perfect security_, next considers this both as _another question_ and as
_not another question_. Thus the Board having said "whether he (Major
Hart) ought to have derived any profit upon the original price of the
rice, so in his possession, is another question," can yet add, "but
_suppose he ought not_, when he[B] openly supplied it to our army,
and was contented with much less (profit) than he might have obtained
with perfect security, we cannot think it a crime of the blackest
die.--Papers, p. 232.

[B] See in page 11, and query he or Captain Macleod; also
whether openly or covertly supplied, &c.

The Board continues "this, and the circumstance of his silence, from the
16th to the 22d of April, appear to us the only points of doubt in the
whole case, and a conduct doubtful only on two such points does not, in
our contemplation, warrant the sentence[C] that has been passed upon it,
with the consequences to his fortune and honour to which it has led."
Papers, p. 232.

[C] The propriety of Major Hart's dismission, after suspension
from the Company's service, is, perhaps, self-evident, and might
have been a ground of thanks; but who would have thanked the
Court of Directors for being now made to deem correct, what
formerly they were pleased to deem incorrect, viz. an Act of
Parliament, and the one cited on what are called the Mandamus
Papers!

But, "in our contemplation" of this "whole case," there are yet to be
noticed other two grand points of doubt. And first, as Lord Harris
writes, "it was not the loss of rice in the department of the Commissary
of Grain _alone_ that so seriously affected the general store of
provision for the army, but," again, secondly, "that infinitely more
extensive and entirely unexpected deficiency which was discovered, on
the 16th of April, in the quantity carried by bullocks, hired in the
Ceded Districts, under the authority of Lieutenant-Colonel Read, and of
which Captain Macleod was in the general superintendance."

Lord Harris explains, saying "Captain Macleod, to whom no report of
material loss had been made by the carriers on the 3d of April, had, on
the 5th, given me a report, of which a copy is enclosed, by which it
appeared that rice, the property of government, sufficient for the
consumption of 30,000 men, at half a seer per day,