ne or
acknowledgment is distinguished from a bribe. To show your Lordships
this, we shall give in evidence, that, whenever a peshcush or fine is
paid, it is a sum of money publicly paid, and paid in proportion to the
grant,--and that the sum is entered upon the very grant itself. We shall
prove the nuzzer is in the same manner entered, and that all legal fees
are indorsed upon the body of the grant for which they are taken: and
that they are no more in the East than in the West any kind of color or
pretence for corrupt acts, which are known by the circumstance of their
being clandestinely taken, and which are acknowledged and confessed to
be illegal and corrupt. Having stated that Mr. Hastings, in some of the
evidence that we shall produce, endeavors to confound these three
things, I am only to remark that the nuzzer is generally a very small
sum of money, that it sometimes amounts to one gold mohur, that
sometimes it is less, and that, in all the records of the Company, I
have never known it exceed one gold mohur, or about thirty-five
shillings,--passing by the fifty gold mohurs which were given to Mr.
Hastings by Cheyt Sing, and a hundred gold mohurs which were given to
the Mogul, as a nuzzer, by Mahomed Ali, Nabob of Arcot.

The Company, seeing that this nuzzer, though small in each sum, might
amount at last to a large tax upon the country, (and it did so in fact,)
thought proper to prohibit any sum of money to be taken upon any pretext
whatever; and the Company in the year 1775 did expressly explode the
whole doctrine of peshcush, nuzzer, and every other private lucrative
emolument, under whatever name, to be taken by the Governor-General, and
did expressly send out an order that that was the construction of the
act, and that he was not even to take a nuzzer. Thus we shall show that
that act had totally cut up the whole system of bribery and corruption,
and that Mr. Hastings had no sort of color whatever for taking the money
which we shall prove he has taken.

I know that positive prohibitions, that acts of Parliament, that
covenants, are things of very little validity indeed, as long as all the
means of corruption are left in power, and all the temptations to
corrupt profit are left in poverty. I should really think that the
Company deserved to be ill served, if they had not annexed such
appointments to great trusts as might secure the persons intrusted from
the temptations of unlawful emolument, and, what in all