_ostensible_ provision, at least for
that investment." For 1783 nothing appears even ostensible.

By this failure a total revolution ensued, of the most extraordinary
nature, and to which your Committee wish to call the particular
attention of the House. For the Council-General, in their letter of the
8th of April, 1782, after stating that they were disappointed in their
expectations, (how grounded it does not appear,) "thought that they
should be able to spare a sum to the Board of Trade,"--tell the Court of
Directors, "that they had adopted a _new_ method of keeping up the
investment, by private subscribers for eighty lacs of rupees, which will
find _cargoes for their ships_ on the usual terms of privilege, _at the
risk of the individuals_, and is to be repaid to them _according to the
produce of the sales in England_,"--and they tell the Directors, that "a
copy of the plan makes a number in their separate dispatches over land."

It is impossible, in reporting this revolution to the House, to avoid
remarking with what fidelity Mr. Hastings and his Council have adhered
to the mode of transmitting their accounts which your Committee found it
necessary to mark and censure in their First Report. Its pernicious
tendency is there fully set forth. They were peculiarly called on for a
most accurate state of their affairs, in order to explain the necessity
of having recourse to such a scheme, as well as for a full and correct
account of the scheme itself. But they send only the above short minute
by one dispatch over land, whilst the copy of the plan itself, on which
the Directors must form their judgment, is sent separately in another
dispatch over land, which has never arrived. A third dispatch, which
also contained the plan, was sent by a sea conveyance, and arrived late.
The Directors have, for very obvious reasons, ordered, by a strict
injunction, that they should send _duplicates of all_ their dispatches
by _every ship_. The spirit of this rule, perhaps, ought to extend to
every mode of conveyance. In this case, so far from sending a duplicate,
they do not send even one perfect account. They announce a plan by one
conveyance, and they send it by another conveyance, with other delays
and other risks.

At length, at nearly four months' distance, the plan has been received,
and appears to be substantially that which had been announced, but
developing in the particulars many new circumstances of the greatest
importance. By