d to answer upon honor or upon oath.
Answering upon honor is a strange way they have got in India, as your
Lordships may see in the course of this inquiry. But he forgets, that,
being the Company's servant, the Company may bring a bill in Chancery
against him, and force him upon oath to give an account. He has not,
however, given them light enough or afforded them sufficient ground for
a fishing bill in Chancery. Yet he says, "If you call upon me in a
Chancery way, or by Common Law, I really will abdicate all forms, and
give you some account." In consequence of this the Company did demand
from him an account, regularly, and as fully and formally as if they had
demanded it in a court of justice. He positively refused to give them
any account whatever; and they have never, to this very day in which we
speak, had any account that is at all clear or satisfactory. Your
Lordships will see, as I go through this scene of fraud, falsification,
iniquity, and prevarication, that, in defiance of his promise, which
promise they quote upon him over and over again, he has never given them
any account of this matter.

He goes on to say (and the threat is indeed alarming) that by calling
him to account they may provoke him--to what? "To appropriate," he says,
"to my own use the sums which I have already passed to your credit, by
the unworthy and, pardon me, if I add, dangerous, reflections which you
have passed upon me for the first communication of this kind." They
passed no reflections: they said they would neither praise nor blame
him, but pressed him for an account of a matter which they could not
understand: and I believe your Lordships understand it no more than
they, for it is not in the compass of human understanding to conceive or
comprehend it. Instead of an account of it, he dares to threaten them:
"I may be tempted, if you should provoke me, not to be an honest
man,--to falsify your account a second time, and to reclaim those sums
which I have passed to your credit,--to alter the account again, by the
assistance of Mr. Larkins." What a dreadful declaration is this of his
dominion over the public accounts, and of his power of altering them! a
declaration, that, having first falsified those accounts in order to
deceive them, and afterwards having told them of this falsification in
order to gain credit with them, if they provoke him, he shall take back
the money he had carried to their account, and make them his debtors for
it!