r confidence, in a late letter[41] (in which,
notwithstanding the censures of Parliament, he magnifies his own
conduct) he says, that, in all the long period of his service, "he has
almost unremittedly wanted the support which all his predecessors had
enjoyed from their constituents. From mine," says he, "I have received
_nothing but reproach, hard_ epithets, _and indignities_, instead of
rewards and encouragement." It must therefore have been from some other
source of protection than that which the law had placed over him that he
looked for countenance and reward in violating an act of Parliament
which forbid him from _taking gifts or presents on any account
whatsoever_,--much less a gift of this magnitude, which, from the
distress of the giver, must be supposed the effect of the most cruel
extortion.

The Directors did wrong in their orders to appropriate money, which they
must know could not have been acquired by the consent of the pretended
donor, to their own use.[42] They acted more properly in refusing to
confirm this grant to Mr. Hastings, and in choosing rather to refer him
to the law which he had violated than to his own sense of what he
thought he was entitled to take from the natives: putting him in mind
that the Regulating Act had expressly declared "that no
Governor-General, or any of the Council, shall, directly or indirectly,
accept, receive, or take, of or from any person or persons, or on any
account whatsoever, any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward,
pecuniary or otherwise, or any promise or engagement for any of the
aforesaid." Here is no reserve for the case of a disclosure to the
Directors, and for the legalizing the breach of an act of Parliament by
their subsequent consent. The illegality attached to the action at its
very commencement, and it could never be afterwards legalized: the
Directors had no such power reserved to them. Words cannot be devised of
a stronger import or studied with more care. To these words of the act
are opposed the declaration and conduct of Mr. Hastings, who, in his
letter of January, 1782, thinks fit to declare, that "an offer of a very
considerable sum of money was made to him, both on the part of the Nabob
and his ministers, as _a present_, which he _accepted without
hesitation_." The plea of his pretended necessity is of no avail. The
present was not in ready money, nor, as your Committee conceive,
applicable to his immediate necessities. Even his credit w