"To be sure, I took it as a bribe; I
admit the party gave me it as a bribe: I concealed it for a time,
because I thought it was for the interest of the Company to conceal it;
but I had a secret intention, in my own mind, of applying it to their
service: you shall have it; but you shall have it as I please, and when
I please; and this bribe becomes sanctified the moment I think fit to
apply it to your service." Now can it be supposed that the India
Company, or that the act of Parliament, meant, by declaring that the
property taken by a corrupt servant, contrary to the true intent of his
covenant, was theirs, to give a license to take such property,--and that
one mode of obtaining a revenue was by the breach of the very covenants
which were meant to prevent extortion, peculation, and corruption? What
sort of body is the India Company, which, coming to the verge of
bankruptcy by the robbery of half the world, is afterwards to subsist
upon the alms of peculation and bribery, to have its strength recruited
by the violation of the covenants imposed upon its own servants? It is
an odd sort of body to be so fed and so supported. This new constitution
of revenue that he has made is indeed a very singular contrivance. It is
a revenue to be collected by any officer of the Company, (for they are
all alike forbidden, and all alike permitted,)--to be collected by any
person, from any person, at any time, in any proportion, by any means,
and in any way he pleases; and to be accounted for, or not to be
accounted for, at the pleasure of the collector, and, if applied to
their use, to be applied at his discretion, and not at the discretion of
his employers. I will venture to say that such a system of revenue never
was before thought of. The next part is an exchequer, which he has
formed, corresponding with it. You will find the board of exchequer made
up of officers ostensibly in the Company's service, of their public
accountant and public treasurer, whom Mr. Hastings uses as an accountant
and treasurer of bribes, accountable, not to the Company, but to
himself, acting in no public manner, and never acting but upon his
requisition, concealing all his frauds and artifices to prevent
detection and discovery. In short, it is an exchequer in which, if I may
be permitted to repeat the words I made use of on a former occasion,
extortion is the assessor, in which fraud is the treasurer, confusion
the accountant, oblivion the remembrancer. That th