successful by
his own improvidence, was the consequence of a premeditated design to
overturn the British empire in India, and to exterminate therefrom the
British nation; which design, if it had been true, the said Hastings
might have known, or rationally conjectured, and ought to have provided
against. And if the said Hastings had received any credible information
of such design, it was his duty to lay the same before the Council
Board, and to state the same to the Rajah, when he was in a condition to
have given an answer thereto or to observe thereon, and not, after he
had proscribed and driven him from his dominions, to have inquired into
offences to justify the previous infliction of punishment.

XXVI. That it does not appear, that, in taking the said depositions,
there was any person present on the part of the Rajah to object to the
competence or credibility or relevancy of any of the said affidavits or
other attestations, or to account, otherwise than as the said deponents
did account, for any of the facts therein stated; nor were any copies
thereof sent to the said Rajah, although the Company had a minister at
the place of his residence, namely, in the camp of the Mahratta chief
Sindia, so as to enable him to transmit to the Company any matters which
might induce or enable them to do justice to the injured prince
aforesaid. And it does not appear that the said Hastings has ever
produced any witness, letter, or other document, tending to prove that
the said Rajah ever did carry on any hostile negotiation whatever with
any of those powers with whom he was charged with a conspiracy against
the Company, previous to the period of the said Hastings's having
arrested him in his palace, although he, the said Hastings, had various
agents at the courts of all those princes,--and that a late principal
agent and near relation of a minister of one them, the Rajah of Berar,
called Benaram Pundit, was, at the time of the tumult at Benares,
actually with the said Hastings, and the said Benaram Pundit was by him
highly applauded for his zeal and fidelity, and was therefore by him
rewarded with a large pension on those very revenues which he had taken
from the Rajah Cheyt Sing, and if such a conspiracy had previously
existed, the Mahratta minister aforesaid must have known, and would have
attested it.

XXVII. That it appears that the said Warren Hastings, at the time that
he formed his design of seizing upon the treasures of the