uation, therefore, in which he himself stood, would at least have
been very guarded and cautious. Hear what he next says upon this
subject. "As neither of the other sums passed through his hands, these"
(meaning the scraps) "contained no such specification, and consequently
could not enable him to afford the information with which he has
requested me to furnish you; and it is more than probable, that, if the
affidavit which I took on the 16th December, 1782, had not exposed my
character to the suspicion of my being capable of committing one of the
basest trespasses upon the confidence of mankind, I should, at this
distance of time, have been equally unable to have complied with this
request: but after I became acquainted with the insinuation suggested in
the Eleventh Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, I
thought it but too probable, that, unless I was possessed of the
original memorandum which I had made of these transactions, I might not
at some distant period be able to prove that I had not descended to
commit so base an action. I have therefore always most carefully
preserved every paper which I possessed regarding these transactions."

You see that Mr. Hastings had no memorandums of his accounts; you see,
that, after Mr. Larkins had made his memorandums of them, he had no
design of guarding or keeping them; and you will commend those wicked
and malicious committees who by their reports have told an
accountant-general and first public officer of revenue, that, in order
to guard his character from their suspicions, it was necessary that he
should keep some paper or other of an account. We have heard of the
base, wicked, and mercenary license that has been used by these
gentlemen of India towards the House of Commons: a license to libel and
traduce the diligence of the House of Commons, the purity of their
motives, and the fidelity of their actions, by which the very means of
informing the people are attempted to be used for the purpose of leaving
them in darkness and delusion. But, my Lords, when the
accountant-general declares, that, if the House of Commons had not
expressed, as they ought to express, much diffidence and distrust
respecting these transactions, and even suspected him of perjury, this
very day that man would not have produced a scrap of those papers to
you, but might have turned them to the basest and most infamous of uses.
If, I say, we have saved these valuable fragments by suspect