y, on the very morning
following, to Richard Johnson, Esquire, for his interposition, but to no
purpose; and did likewise, with as little effect, send a message to
Cantoo Baboo, native steward and confidential agent of the said
Hastings, which was afterwards reduced into writing, "to exculpate
himself from any concern in what had passed, and to profess his
obedience to his _will_ [Hastings's] _in whatever_ way he should
dictate." But the said Hastings, for several false and contradictory
reasons by him assigned, did not take any advantage of the said opening,
attributing the same to artifice in order to gain time; but instead of
accepting the said submissions, he did resolve upon flight from the city
of Benares, and did suddenly fly therefrom in great confusion.

XV. That the said Hastings did persevere in his resolutions not to
listen to any submission or offer of accommodation whatsoever, though
several were afterwards made through almost every person who might be
supposed to have influence with him, but did cause the Rajah's troops to
be attacked and fallen upon, though they only acted on the defensive,
(as the Rajah has without contradiction asserted,) and thereby, and by
his preceding refusal of propositions of the same nature, and by other
his perfidious, unjust, and tyrannical acts by him perpetrated and done,
and by his total improvidence in not taking any one rational security
whatsoever against the inevitable consequences of those acts, did make
himself guilty of all the mutual slaughter and devastation which ensued,
as well as, in his opinion, of the imminent danger of the total
subversion of the British power in India by the risk of his own person,
which he asserts that it did run,--as also "that it ought not to be
thought that he attributed too much consequence to his personal safety,
when he supposed _the fate of the British empire in India connected with
it_, and that, mean as its substance may be, its accidental qualities
were equivalent to those which, like the characters of a talisman in
the Arabian mythology, formed the _essence_ of the state itself,
representation, title, and the _estimate_ of the public opinion; that,
had he fallen, such a stroke would be universally considered as decisive
of the national fate; every state round it would have started into arms
against it, and _every subject of its own dominion would, according to
their several abilities, have become its enemy_": and that he knew and