ing his
integrity, your Lordships will see suspicion is of some use: and I hope
the world will learn that punishment will be of use, too, in preventing
such transactions.

Your Lordships have seen that no two persons knew anything of these
transactions; you see that even memorandums of transactions of very
great moment, some of which had passed in the year 1779, were not even
so much as put in the shape of complete memoranda until May, 1782; you
see that Mr. Hastings never kept them: and there is no reason to imagine
that a black banian and a Persian moonshee would have been careful of
what Mr. Hastings himself, who did not seem to stimulate his accountants
to a vast deal of exactness and a vast deal of fidelity, was negligent.
You see that Mr. Larkins, our last, our only hope, if he had not been
suspected by the House of Commons, probably would never have kept these
papers; and that you could not have had this valuable cargo, such as it
is, if it had not been for the circumstance Mr. Larkins thinks proper to
mention.

From the specimen which we have given of Mr. Hastings's mode of
accounts, of its vouchers, checks, and counter-checks, your Lordships
will have observed that the mode itself is past describing, and that the
checks and counter-checks, instead of being put upon one another to
prevent abuse, are put upon each other to prevent discovery and to
fortify abuse. When you hear that one man has an account of receipt,
another of expenditure, another of control, you say that office is well
constituted: but here is an office constituted by different persons
without the smallest connection with each other; for the only purpose
which they have ever answered is the purpose of base concealment.

We shall now proceed a little further with Mr. Larkins. The first of the
papers from which he took the memoranda was a paper of Cantoo Baboo. It
contained detached payments, amounting in the whole, with the cabooleat,
or agreement, to about 95,000_l._ sterling, and of which it appears that
there was received by Mr. Croftes 55,000_l._, and no more.

Now will your Lordships be so good as to let it rest in your memory what
sort of an exchequer this is, even with regard to its receipts? As your
Lordships have seen the economy and constitution of this office, so now
see the receipt. It appears that in the month of May, 1782, out of the
sums beginning to be received in the month of Shawal, that is in July,
1779, there was, during th