s, or of any of the other white banians of Mr.
Hastings:--"Oh, I have forgotten." Here you have an accountant-general
kept in ignorance, or who pretends to be ignorant, of so large a payment
as 250,000_l._; who enters it falsely in his account; and when asked who
apprised him of his mistake, says that he has really forgotten.

Oh, my Lords, what resources there are in oblivion! what resources there
are in bad memory! No genius ever has done so much for mankind as this
mental defect has done for Mr. Hastings's accountants. It was said by
one of the ancient philosophers, to a man who proposed to teach people
memory,--"I wish you could teach me oblivion; I wish you could teach me
to forget." These people have certainly not been taught the art of
memory, but they appear perfect masters of the art of forgetting. My
Lords, this is not all; and I must request your Lordships' attention to
the whole of the account, as it appears in the account of the arrears
due to the King, annexed to your minutes. Here is a kind of labyrinth,
where fraud runs into fraud. On the credit side you find stated there,
eight lacs paid to the Vizier, and to be taken from the Mogul's tribute,
for the support of an army, of which he himself had stipulated to bear
the whole expenses. These eight lacs are thus fraudulently accounted for
upon the face of the thing; and with respect to eighteen lacs, the
remainder of the tribute, there is no account given of it at all. This
sum Mr. Hastings must, therefore, have pocketed for his own use, or that
of his gang of peculators; and whilst he was pretending to save you
eight lacs by one fraud, he committed another fraud of eighteen lacs for
himself: and this is the method by which one act of peculation begets
another in the economy of fraud.

Thus much of these affairs I think myself bound to state to your
Lordships upon this occasion; for, although not one word has been
produced by the counsel to support the allegations of the prisoner at
your bar, yet, knowing that your Lordships, high as you are, are still
but men, knowing also that bold assertions and confident declarations
are apt to make some impression upon all men's minds, we oppose his
allegations. But how do we oppose them? Not by things of the like
nature. We oppose them by showing you that the House of Commons, after
diligent investigation, has condemned them, and by stating the grounds
upon which the House founded its condemnation. We send you to the