ns with the rest." For some purposes, he thought it necessary to
use the most complicated and artful concealments; for some, he could not
tell what his motives were; and for others, that it was mere
carelessness. Here is the exchequer of bribery!--have I falsified any
part of my original stating of it?--an exchequer in which the man who
ought to pay receives, the man who ought to give security takes it, the
man who ought to keep an account says he has forgotten; an exchequer in
which oblivion was the remembrancer; and, to sum up the whole, an
exchequer into the accounts of which it was useless to inquire. This is
the manner in which the account of near two hundred thousand pounds is
given to the Court of Directors. You can learn nothing in this business
that is any way distinct, except a premeditated design of a concealment
of his transactions. That is avowed.

But there is a more serious thing behind. Who were the instruments of
his concealment? No other, my Lords, than the Company's public
accountant. That very accountant takes the money, knowing it to be the
Company's, and that it was only pretended to be advanced by Mr. Hastings
for the Company's use. He sees Mr. Hastings make out bonds to himself
for it, and Mr. Hastings makes him enter him as creditor, when in fact
he was debtor. Thus he debauches the Company's accountant, and makes him
his confederate. These fraudulent and corrupt acts, covered by false
representations, are proved to be false not by collation with anything
else, but false by a collation with themselves. This, then, is the
account, and his explanation of it; and in this insolent, saucy,
careless, negligent manner, a public accountant like Mr. Hastings, a man
bred up a book-keeper in the Company's service, who ought to be exact,
physically exact, in his account, has not only been vicious in his own
account, but made the public accounts vicious and of no value.

But there is in this account another curious circumstance with regard to
the deposit of this sum of money, to which he referred in his first
paragraph of his letter of the 29th of November, 1780. He states that
this deposit was made and passed into the hands of Mr. Larkins on the
1st of June. It did so; but it is not entered in the Company's accounts
till November following. Now in all that intermediate space where was
it? what account was there of it? It was entirely a secret between Mr.
Larkins and Mr. Hastings, without a possibility of an