draws such inferences as necessarily or
with a strong probability follow them. And if I understand it at all,
which God knows I no more pretend to do than Don Quixote did those
sentences of lovers in romance-writers of which he said it made him run
mad to attempt to discover the meaning, the inference is, "Why do you
call upon me for accounts now, three years after the time when I could
not give you them? I cannot give them you. And as to the papers relating
to them, I do not know whether they exist; and if they do, perhaps you
may learn something from them, perhaps you may not: I will write to Mr.
Larkins for those papers, if you please." Now, comparing this with his
other accounts, you will see what a monstrous scheme he has laid of
fraud and concealment to cover his peculation. He tells them,--"I have
said that the three first sums of the account were paid into the
Company's treasury without passing through my hands. The second of these
was forced into notice by its destination and application to the expense
of a detachment which was formed and employed against Mahdajee Sindia,
under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly
apprised the Court of Directors in my letter of the 29th December
[November?], 1780." He does not yet tell the Directors from whom he
received it: we have found it out by other collateral means.--"The other
two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be made
public, though intended for public service, and actually applied to it.
The exigencies of government were at that time my own, and every
pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind. Wherever I
could find allowable means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized
them."--Allowable means of receiving bribes! for such I shall prove them
to be in the particular instances.--"But neither could it occur to me as
necessary to state on our Proceedings every little aid that I could thus
procure; nor do I know how I could have stated it without appearing to
court favor by an ostentation which I disdained, nor without the chance
of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by the constructive assertion
of a separate and unparticipated merit, derived from the influence of my
station, to which they might have had an equal claim."

Now we see, that, after hammering his brains for many years, he does
find out his motive, which he could not verify at the time,--namely,
that, if he let his colleagues know that he was re