-founded charges. We come here to bring
the matter to the test, and here it shall be brought to the test,
between the Commons of Great Britain and this East India delinquent. In
his letter of the 21st of February, 1784, he says he has never benefited
himself by contingent accounts; and as an excuse for taking this bribe
from Nobkissin, which he did not discover at the time, but many years
afterwards, at the bar of the House of Commons, he declares that he
wanted to apply it to the contingent account for his expenses, that is,
for what he pretended to have laid out for the Company, during a great
number of years. He proceeds:--

"If it should be objected, that the allowance of these demands would
furnish a precedent for others of the like kind, I have to remark, that
in their whole amount they are but the aggregate of a contingent account
of twelve years; and if it were to become the practice of those who have
passed their prime of life in your service, and filled, as I have filled
it, the first office of your dominion, to glean from their past accounts
all the articles of expense which their inaccuracy or indifference hath
overlooked, your interests would suffer infinitely less by the precedent
than by a single example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores
for your benefit and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of
private want and to sink in obscurity."

Here is the man that has told us at the bar of the House of Commons that
he never made up any contingent accounts; and yet, as a set-off against
this bribe, which he received for himself, and never intended to apply
to the current use of the Company, he feigns and invents a claim upon
them, namely, that he had, without any authority of the Company,
squandered away in stationery and budgeros, and other idle services, a
sum amounting to 34,000_l._ But was it for the Company's service? Is
this language to be listened to? "Everything I thought fit to expend I
have expended for the Company's service. I intended, indeed, at that
time, to have been generous. I intended out of my own pocket to have
paid for a translation of the code of Gentoo laws. I was then in the
prime of my life, flowing in money, and had great expectations: I am now
old; I cannot afford to be generous: I will look back into all my former
accounts, pen, ink, wax, everything that I generously or prodigally
spent as my own humor might suggest; and though, at the same time, I
know you have gi