Company's servants ought to be
carried on and their proceedings regulated; your Lordships, therefore,
will please to hear read the orders given concerning correspondence of
every kind with the country powers. You will remember the period when
these orders were issued, namely, the period at which the act passed for
the better direction of the servants of the Company. By this act Mr.
Hastings was appointed to be Governor-General, and the Court of
Directors was required by that act to prepare orders and instructions,
which Mr. Hastings was required by the same act to comply with. You will
see what these instructions and orders were, and in what manner he has
complied with them.

_Extract of General Instructions to the Governor-General and
Council, 29th of March, 1774._

"We direct that you assemble in Council twice every week, and that
all the members be duly summoned; that the correspondence with the
princes or country powers in India be carried on by the
Governor-General only, but that all letters sent by him be first
approved in Council, and that he lay before the Council, at their
next meeting, all letters received by him in the course of such
correspondence, for their information. We likewise direct that a
copy of such parts of the country correspondence be communicated to
our Board of Trade: (to be constituted as hereinafter mentioned) as
may any ways relate to the business of their department."

You will observe, my Lords, two important circumstances in these
instructions: first, that, after the board had regularly met, the
Persian correspondence, kept by the Governor only, was to be
communicated to the Council; and, secondly, that he should write no
answer to any part of the business until he had previously consulted the
Council upon it. Here is the law of the land,--an order given in
pursuance of an act of Parliament. Your Lordships will consider how Mr.
Hastings comported himself with regard to those orders: for we charge it
as a substantive crime, independent of the criminal presumptions arising
from it, that he violated an act of Parliament which imposed direct
instructions upon him as to the manner in which he was to conduct all
matters of business with the native powers.

My Lords, we contend strongly that all the positive rules and
injunctions of the law, though they are merely positive, and do not
contain anything but mere matters of regulati