me the most
active prosecutors, and as such may, though under much guard and many
precautions, be used even as witnesses, and that it ought not to be an
exception, supposing their character and capacity otherwise good, to the
appointing them to power, yet to advance persons to power on the ground
not of their honor and integrity, which might have produced the enmity
of bad men, but merely for the enmity itself, without any reference
whatsoever to a laudable cause, and even with a declared ill opinion of
the morals of one of the party, such as was actually delivered in the
said letter by him, the said Hastings, of Nundcomar, (and which time has
shown he might also on good ground have conceived of others,) was, in
the circumstances of a criminal inquiry, a motive highly disgraceful to
the honor of government, and destructive of impartial justice, by
holding out the greatest of all possible temptation to false accusation,
to corrupt and factious conspiracies, to perjury, and to every species
of injustice and oppression.

XIV. That, in consequence of the aforesaid motives, and others
pretended, which were by no means a sufficient justification to the said
Warren Hastings, he did appoint the woman aforesaid, called Munny Begum,
who had been of the lowest and most discreditable order in society,
according to the ideas prevalent in India, but from whom he received
several sums of money, to be guardian to the Nabob in preference to his
own mother, _and to administer the affairs of the government_ in the
place of the said Mahomed Reza Khan, the second Mussulman in rank after
the Nabob, and the first in knowledge, gravity, weight, and character
among the Mussulmen of that province. And in order to try every method
and to take every chance for his destruction, the said Warren Hastings
did maliciously and oppressively keep him under confinement, for a part
of the time without any inquiry, and afterwards with a slow and dilatory
trial, for two years together.

XV. That, notwithstanding a total revolution in the power, in part
avowedly made for his destruction, the persons appointed for his trial
did, on full inquiry, completely acquit the said Mahomed Reza Khan of
the criminal charges against him, on account of which he had been so
long persecuted and confined, and suffered much in mind, body, and
fortune: and the Court of Directors, in their letter of the 3d of March,
1775, testify their satisfaction in the conduct and result of t