But now appeared, in the most striking light, the good policy of Mr.
Hastings's system of 1780, in placing this screen of a Committee between
him and his crimes. The Committee had their lesson. Whilst Paterson is
left collecting his evidence and casting up his accounts in Rungpore,
Debi Sing is called up, in seeming wrath, to the capital, where he is
received as those who have robbed and desolated provinces, and filled
their coffers with seven hundred thousand pounds sterling, have been
usually received at Calcutta, and sometimes in Great Britain. Debi Sing
made good his ground in Calcutta, and when he had well prepared his
Committee, in due time Paterson returns, appears, and reports.

Persons even less informed than your Lordships are well apprised that
all officers representing government, and making in that character an
authorized inquiry, are entitled to a presumptive credit for all their
proceedings, and that their reports of facts (where there is no evidence
of corruption or malice) are in the first instance to be taken for
truth, especially by those who have authorized the inquiry; and it is
their duty to put the burden of proof to the contrary on those who would
impeach or shake the report.

Other principles of policy, and other rules of government, and other
maxims of office prevailed in the Committee of Mr. Hastings's devising.
In order to destroy that just and natural credit of the officer, and the
protection and support they were bound to afford him, they in an instant
shift and reverse all the relations in which the parties stood.

This executive board, instituted for the protection of the revenue and
of the people, and which was no court of justice in fact or name, turned
their own representative officer, reporting facts according to his duty,
into a voluntary accuser who is to make good his charge at his peril;
the farmer-general, whose conduct was not criminally attacked, but
appeared as one of the grounds of a public inquiry, is turned into a
culprit before a court of justice, against whom everything is to be
juridically made out or not admitted; and the members of an executive
board, by usurpation and fraud, erect themselves into judges bound to
proceed by strict rules of law.

By this infamous juggle they took away, as far as in them lay, the
credit due to the proceedings of government. They changed the natural
situation of proofs. They rejected the depositions of Paterson's
witnesses, as not on o