s
concurrence in the agreement passed between us at Chunar, I neither had
nor could have any object _but his relief, and the strengthening of his
connection with the Company_; and that I should not on any other ground
have exposed myself to _the personal obloquy which they could not fail
to draw upon me by my participation in them_, but left him to regulate
by his own discretion and by his own means the economy of his own
finances, and, _with much more cause, the assertion of his domestic
right. In these he had no regular claim to my interference_; nor had I,
in my public character, any claim upon him, but for the payment of the
debt then due from him to the Company, although I was under the
strongest obligations to require it for the relief of the pressing
exigencies of their affairs. He will well remember the manner in which,
at a visit to him in his own tent, I declared my acquiescence freely,
and without hesitation, to each proposition, which afterwards formed the
substance of a written agreement, as he severally made them; and he can
want no other evidence of my motives for _so cheerful a consent_, nor
for the requests which I added as the means of fulfilling his purposes
in them. Had he not made these measures his own option, I should not
have proposed them; _but having once adopted them, and made them the
conditions of a formal and sacred agreement, I had no longer an option
to dispense with them, but was bound to the complete performance and
execution of them, as points of public duty and of national faith, for
which I was responsible to my king, and the Company my immediate
superiors: and this was the reason for my insisting on their performance
and execution, when I was told that the Nabob himself had relaxed from
his original purpose, and expressed a reluctance to proceed in it_."

XXI. That the said Warren Hastings does admit that the Nabob _had_
originally no regular claim upon him for his interference, or he any
claim on the Nabob, which, might entitle him to interfere in the Nabob's
domestic concerns; yet, in order to justify his so invidious an
interference, he did, in the letter aforesaid, give a false account of
the said treaty, which (as before mentioned) did nothing more than give
a _permission_ to the Nabob to resume the jaghires, _if HE should judge
the same to be necessary_, and did therefore leave the right of
dispensing with the whole, or any part thereof, as much in his option
after the treaty