affairs most essentially depends, to provide expedients for future
advantages and guard against probable evils, are all that your
administration can faithfully promise to perform for your service with
their united labors most diligently exerted. They cannot look back
without sacrificing the objects of their immediate duty, which are those
of your interests, to endless researches, which can produce no real
good, and may expose your affairs to all the ruinous consequences of
personal malevolence, both here and at home."

My Lords, this is the first man, I believe, that ever took credit for
his sincerity from his breach of his promises. "I could not," he says,
"have made these promises, if I had not thought that I could perform
them. Now I find I cannot perform them, and you have in that
non-performance and in that profession a security for my sincerity when
I promised them." Upon this principle, any man who makes a promise has
nothing to do afterwards, but to say that he finds himself (without
assigning any particular cause for it) unable to perform it,--not only
to justify himself for his non-performance, but to justify himself and
claim credit for sincerity in his original profession. The charge was
given him specially, and he promised obedience, over and over, upon the
spot, and in the country, in which he was no novice, for he had been
bred in it: it was his native country in one sense, it was the place of
his renewed nativity and regeneration. Yet this very man, as if he was a
novice in it, now says, "I promised you what I now find I cannot
perform." Nay, what is worse, he declares no man could perform it, if he
gave up his whole time to it. And lastly, he says, that the inquiry into
these corruptions, even if you succeeded in it, would do more harm than
good. Now was there ever an instance of a man so basely deserting a
duty, and giving so base a reason for it? His duty was to put an end to
corruption in every channel of government. It cannot be done. Why?
Because it would expose our affairs to malignity and enmity, and end,
perhaps, to our disadvantage. Not only will he connive himself, but he
advises the Company to do it. For fear of what? For fear that their
service was so abandoned and corrupt, that the display of the evil would
tend more to their disreputation than all their attempts to reform it
would tend to their service.

Mr. Hastings should naturally have imagined that the law was a resource
in this despe