ing guilt may be warm, but guilt that is desperate has nothing to
do but to submit to the consequences of it, to bear the infamy annexed
to its situation, and to try to find some consolation in the effects of
guilt with regard to private fortune for the scandal it brings them into
in public reputation. After the business had ended in India, the causes
why he should have given the explanation grew stronger and stronger: for
not only the charges exhibited against him were weighty, but the manner
in which he was called upon to inquire into them was such as would
undoubtedly tend to stir the mind of a man of character, to rouse him to
some consideration of himself, and to a sense of the necessity of his
defence. He was goaded to make this defence by the words I shall read to
your Lordships from Sir John Clavering.

"In the late proceedings of the Revenue Board it will appear that there
is no species of peculation from which the Honorable Governor-General
has thought it reasonable to abstain." He further says, in answer to
Mr. Hastings, "The malicious view with which this innuendo" (an innuendo
of Mr. Hastings) "is thrown out is only worthy of a man who, having
disgraced himself in the eyes of every man of honor both in Asia and in
Europe, and having no imputation to lay to our charge, has dared to
attempt in the dark what malice itself could not find grounds to aim at
openly."

These are the charges which were made upon him,--not loosely, in the
heat of conversation, but deliberately, in writing, entered upon record,
and sent to his employers, the Court of Directors, those whom the law
had set over him, and to whose judgment and opinion he was responsible.
Do your Lordships believe that it was conscious innocence that made him
endure such reproaches, so recorded, from his own colleague? Was it
conscious innocence that made him abandon his defence, renounce his
explanation, and bear all this calumny, (if it was calumny,) in such a
manner, without making any one attempt to refute it? Your Lordships will
see by this, and by other minutes with which the books are filled, that
Mr. Hastings is charged quite to the brim with corruptions of all sorts,
and covered with every mode of possible disgrace. For there is something
so base and contemptible in the crimes of peculation and bribery, that,
when they come to be urged home and strongly against a man, as here they
are urged, nothing but a consciousness of guilt can possibly make a