e determine how far the
circumstance of extortion may aggravate the crime of disobedience
to your positive orders,--the exposing the government in a manner
to sale, and receiving the infamous wages of corruption from
opposite parties and contending interests. We speak with boldness,
because we speak from conviction founded upon indubitable evidence,
that, besides the above sums specified in the distribution account,
to the amount of 228,125_l._ sterling, there was likewise to the
value of several lacs of rupees procured from Nundcomar and Roy
Dullub, each of whom aspired at and obtained a promise of that very
employment it was predetermined to bestow on Mahomed Reza Khan.

(Signed at the end,)
"CLIVE.
W^M B. SUMNER.
JOHN CARNAC.
H. VERELST.
FRA^S SYKES."

My Lords, the persons who sign this letter are mostly the friends, and
one of them is the gentleman who is bail for and sits near Mr. Hastings.
They state to you this horrible and venal transaction, by which the
government was set to sale, by which a bastard son was elevated to the
wrong of the natural and legitimate heir, and in which a prostitute, his
mother, was put in the place of the honorable and legitimate mother of
the representative of the family.

Now, if there was one thing more than another under heaven, which Mr.
Hastings ought to have shunned, it was the suspicion of being concerned
in any such infamous transaction as that which is here recorded to be
so,--a transaction in which the country government had before been sold
to this very woman and her offspring, and in which two great candidates
for power in that country fought against each other, and perhaps the
largest offerer carried it.

When a Governor-General sees the traces of corruption in the conduct of
his predecessors, the traces of injustice following that corruption, the
traces of notorious irregularity in setting aside the just claimants in
favor of those that have no claim at all, he has that before his eyes
which ought to have made him the more scrupulously avoid, and to keep at
the farthest distance possible from, the contagion and even the
suspicion of being corrupted by it. Moreover, my Lords, it was in
consequence of these very transactions that the new covenants were made,
which bind the servants of the Company never to take a present of above
two hundred pounds, or some such sum of m