Your Committee, considering that so long a time had elapsed without any of that information which the Directors expected, and perceiving that this receipt of sums of money under color of gift seemed a growing evil, ordered the attendance of Mr. Hastings's agent, Major Scott. They had found, on former occasions, that this gentleman was furnished with much more early and more complete intelligence of the Company's affairs in India than was thought proper for the Court of Directors; they therefore examined him concerning every particular sum of money the receipt of which Mr. Hastings had confessed in his account. It was to their surprise that Mr. Scott professed himself perfectly uninstructed upon almost every part of the subject, though the express object of his mission to England was to clear up such matters as might be objected to Mr. Hastings; and for that purpose he had early qualified himself by the production to your Committee of his powers of agency. The ignorance in which Mr. Hastings had left his agent was the more striking, because he must have been morally certain, that, if his conduct in these points should have escaped animadversion from the Court of Directors, it must become an object of Parliamentary inquiry; for, in his letter of the 15th [16th?] of December, 1782, to the Court of Directors, he expressly mentions his fears that those Parliamentary inquiries might be thought to have extorted from him the confessions which he had made.
Your Committee, however, entering on a more strict examination concerning the two lacs of rupees, which Mr. Hastings declares he had no right to take, but had taken from some person then unknown, Major Scott recollected that Mr. Hastings had, in a letter of the 7th of December, 1782, (in which he refers to some former letter,) acquainted him with the name of the person from whom he had received these two lacs of rupees, mentioned in the minute of June, 1780. It turned out to be the Rajah of Benares, the unfortunate Cheyt Sing.
In the single instance in which Mr. Scott seemed to possess intelligence in this matter, he is preferred to the Court of Directors. Under their censure as Mr. Hastings was, and as he felt himself to be, for not informing them of the channel in which he received that money, he perseveres obstinately and contemptuously to conceal it from them; though he thought fit to intrust his agent with the secret.
Your Committee were extremely struck with this intelligence. They were totally unacquainted with it, when they presented to the House the Supplement to their Second Report, on the affairs of Cheyt Sing. A gift received by Mr. Hastings from the Rajah of Benares gave rise in their minds to serious reflections on the condition of the princes of India subjected to the British authority. Mr. Hastings was, at the very time of his receiving this gift, in the course of making on the Rajah of Benares a series of demands, unfounded and unjustifiable, and constantly growing in proportion as they were submitted to. To these demands the Rajah of Benares, besides his objections in point of right, constantly sat up a plea of poverty. Presents from persons who hold up poverty as a shield against extortion can scarcely in any case be considered as gratuitous, whether the plea of poverty be true or false. In this case the presents might have been bestowed; if not with an assurance, at least with a rational hope, of some mitigation in the oppressive requisitions that were made by Mr. Hastings; for to give much voluntarily, when it is known that much will be taken away forcibly, is a thing absurd and impossible. On the other [one?] hand, the acceptance of that gift by Mr. Hastings must have pledged a tacit faith for some degree of indulgence towards the donor: if it was a free gift, gratitude, if it was a bargain, justice obliged him to do it. If, on the other hand, Mr. Hastings originally destined (as he says he did) this money, given to himself secretly and for his private emolument, to the use of the Company, the Company's favor, to whom he acted as trustee, ought to have been purchased by it. In honor and justice he bound and pledged himself for that power which was to profit by the gift, and to profit, too, in the success of an expedition which Mr. Hastings thought so necessary to their aggrandizement. The unhappy man found his money accepted, but no favor acquired on the part either of the Company or of Mr. Hastings.
Your Committee have, in another Report, stated to the House that Mr. Hastings attributed the extremity of distress which the detachments under Colonel Camac had suffered, and the great desertions which ensued on that expedition, to the want of punctuality of the Rajah in making payment of one of the sums which had been extorted from him; and this want of punctual payment was afterwards assigned as a principal reason for the ruin of this prince. Your Committee have shown to the House, by a comparison of facts and dates, that this charge is wholly without foundation. But if the cause of Colonel Camac's failure had been true as to the sum which was the object of the public demand, the failure could not be attributed to the Rajah, when he had on the instant privately furnished at least 23,000l. to Mr. Hastings,—that is, furnished the identical money which he tells us (but carefully concealing the name of the giver) he had from the beginning destined, as he afterwards publicly offered, for this very expedition of Colonel Camac's. The complication of fraud and cruelty in the transaction admits of few parallels. Mr. Hastings at the Council Board of Bengal displays himself as a zealous servant of the Company, bountifully giving from his own fortune, and in his letter to the Directors (as he says himself) as going out of the ordinary roads for their advantage;[22] and all this on the credit of supplies derived from the gift of a man whom he treats with the utmost severity, and whom he accuses, in this particular, of disaffection to the Company's cause and interests.
With 23,000l. of the Rajah's money in his pocket, he persecutes him to his destruction,—assigning for a reason, that his reliance on the Rajah's faith, and his breach of it, were the principal causes that no other provision was made for the detachment on the specific expedition to which the Rajah's specific money was to be applied. The Rajah had given it to be disposed of by Mr. Hastings; and if it was not disposed of in the best manner for the accomplishing his objects, the accuser himself is the criminal.
To take money for the forbearance of a just demand would have been corrupt only; but to urge unjust public demands,—to accept private pecuniary favors in the course of those demands,—and, on the pretence of delay or refusal, without mercy to persecute a benefactor,—to refuse to hear his remonstrances,—to arrest him in his capital, in his palace, in the face of all the people,—thus to give occasion to an insurrection, and, on pretext of that insurrection, to refuse all treaty or explanation,—to drive him from his government and his country,—to proscribe him in a general amnesty,—and to send him all over India a fugitive, to publish the shame of British government in all the nations to whom he successively fled for refuge,—these are proceedings to which, for the honor of human nature, it is hoped few parallels are to be found in history, and in which the illegality and corruption of the acts form the smallest part of the mischief.
Such is the account of the first sum confessed to be taken as a present by Mr. Hastings, since the year 1775; and such are its consequences. Mr. Hastings apologizes for this action by declaring "that he would not have received the money but for the occasion, which prompted him to avail himself of the accidental means which were at that instant afforded him of accepting and converting it to the use of the Company."[23] By this account, he considers the act as excusable only by the particular occasion, by the temptation of accidental means, and by the suggestion of the instant. How far this is the case appears by the very next paragraph of this letter in which the account is given and in which the apology is made. If these were his sentiments in June, 1780, they lasted but a very short time: his accidental means appear to be growing habitual.
To point out in a clear manner the spirit of the second money transaction to which your Committee adverted, which is represented by Mr. Hastings as having some "affinity with the former anecdote,"[24] (for in this light kind of phrase he chooses to express himself to his masters,) your Committee think it necessary to state to the House, that the business, namely, this business, which was the second object of their inquiry, appears in three different papers and in three different lights: on comparing of these authorities, in every one of which Mr. Hastings is himself the voucher, if one of the three be true, the other two must necessarily be false.