concerted, was not to restore and establish a general peace
throughout India, but to engage the India Company in a new war against
Hyder Ali, and to make the Mahrattas parties therein. That the eagerness
and passion with which the said Hastings pursued this object laid him
open to the Mahrattas, who depended thereon for obtaining whatever they
should demand from us. That, in order to carry the point of an offensive
alliance against Hyder Ali, the said Hastings exposed the negotiation
for peace with the Mahrattas to many difficulties and delays. That the
Mahrattas were bound by a clear and recent engagement, which Hyder had
never violated in any article, to make no peace with us which should not
include him; that they pleaded the sacred nature of this obligation in
answer to all our requisitions on this head, while the said Hastings,
still importunate for his favorite point, suggested to them various
means of reconciling a substantial breach of their engagement with a
formal observance of it, and taught them how they might at once be
parties in a peace with Hyder Ali and in an offensive alliance for
immediate hostility against him. That these lessons of public duplicity
and artifice, and these devices of ostensible faith and real treachery,
could have no effect but to degrade the national character, and to
inspire the Mahrattas themselves, with whom we were in treaty, with a
distrust in our sincerity and good faith. That the object of this
fraudulent policy (viz., the utter destruction of Hyder Ali, and a
partition of his dominions) was neither wise in itself, or authorized by
the orders and instructions of the Company to their servants; that it
was incompatible with the treaty of peace, in which Hyder Ali was
included, and contrary to the repeated and best-understood injunctions
of the Company,--being, in the first place, a bargain for a new war,
and, in the next, aiming at an extension of our territory by conquest.
That the best and soundest political opinions on the relations of these
states have always represented our great security against the power of
the Mahrattas to depend on its being balanced by that of Hyder Ali; and
the Mysore country is so placed as a barrier between the Carnatic and
the Mahrattas as to make it our interest rather to strengthen and repair
that barrier than to level and destroy it. That the said treaty of
partition does express itself to be _eventual_ with regard to the making
and keeping of pe