the Court of Directors, and without any regard to the interests of the
India Company, for the sole purpose of creating an instant fortune for
the said Sulivan at the expense of the India Company, without any claim
of service or pretence of merit on his part, and without any apparent
motive whatever, except that of securing or rewarding the attachment and
support of his father, Lawrence Sulivan, a person of great authority and
influence in the direction of the Company's affairs, and notoriously
attached to and connected with the said Warren Hastings.

That the said Stephen Sulivan neither possessed nor pretended to possess
any skill in the business of his contract; that he exerted no industry,
nor showed or could show any exactness, in the performance of it, since
he immediately sold the contract for a sum of money to another person,
(for the sole purpose of which sale it must be presumed the same was
given,) by which person another profit was to be made; and by that
person the same was again sold to a third, by whom a third profit was to
be made.

That the said Warren Hastings, at the very time when he engaged the
Company in a contract for engrossing the whole of the opium produced in
Bengal and Bahar in the ensuing four years on terms of such exorbitant
profit to the contractor, affirmed, that "there was little prospect of
selling the opium in Bengal at a reasonable price, and that it was but
natural to suppose that the price of opium _would fall, from the demand
being lessened_"; that in a letter dated the 5th of May, 1781, he
informed the Directors, "that, owing to the indifferent state of the
markets last season to the Eastward, and the very enhanced rates of
insurance which the war had occasioned, they had not been able to
dispose of the opium of the present year to so great an advantage as
they expected, and that more than one half of it remained still in their
warehouses." That the said Warren Hastings was guilty of a manifest
breach of trust to his constituents and his employers in monopolizing,
for their pretended use, an article of commerce for which he declared
_no purchasers had offered, and that there was little prospect of any
offering, and the price of which_, he said, _it was but natural to
suppose would fall_.

That the said Warren Hastings, having, by his own act, loaded the
Company with a commodity for which, either in the ordinary and regular
course of public auction, or even by private contract,