apply to the Mahrattas; and he informs the Court of Directors
that he did, on the very first advice he received of the flight of the
Mogul's son, write to Mr. James Anderson to apprise the Mahratta chief,
Sindia, of that event,--"for which as he was unprepared, he desired his
[the said Sindia's] advice for his conduct on the occasion of it." Which
method of calling for the advice of a foreign power to regulate his
political conduct, instead of being regulated therein by the advice of
the British Council and the standing orders of the Court of Directors,
was a procedure highly criminal; and the crime is aggravated by his not
communicating the said correspondence to the Council-General, as by his
duty he was bound to do; but it does abundantly prove his concert with
the Mahrattas in all that related to his negotiations in the Mogul
court, which were carried on agreeably to their advice, and in
subserviency to their views and purposes.

XVIII. That, in consequence of the cabal begun with the Mahrattas, the
said chief, Sindia, did send his "familiar and confidential ministers"
to him, the said Hastings, being at Lucknow, with whom the said Hastings
did hold several secret conferences, without any secretary or other
assistant: and the said Hastings hath not conveyed to the Court of
Directors any minutes thereof, but hath purposely involved even the
general effect and tendency of these conferences in such obscurity that
it is no otherwise possible to perceive the drift and tendency of the
same, but by the general scope of councils and acts relative to the
politics of the Mogul and of the Mahrattas together, and by the final
event of the whole, which is sufficiently visible. For

XIX. That the said Hastings had declared, in his said letter of the 16th
June, 1784, that the Mogul's right to our assistance had been constantly
acknowledged, that the Mogul had been oppressed by the lesser Mahomedan
princes in the character of his officers of state and military
commanders, and he did plainly intimate that the said Mogul ought to be
relieved from that servitude. And he did, in giving an account to the
Court of Directors of the conferences aforesaid, assure them that "his
inclinations [the inclinations of the Mahratta chief aforesaid] were not
very dissimilar from his own"; and that "neither in this nor in any
other instance would he suffer himself to be drawn into measures which
shall tend to weaken their connection, nor _in this eve