These three authorities, which your Committee has accurately compared, are, first, his minutes on the Consultations;[25] secondly, his letter to the Court of Directors on the 29th of November, 1780;[26] thirdly, his account, transmitted on the 16th of December, 1782.[27]
About eight months after the first transaction relative to Cheyt Sing, and which is just reported, that is, on the 5th of January, 1781, Mr. Hastings produced a demand to the Council for money of his own expended for the Company's service.[28] Here was no occasion for secrecy. Mr. Francis was on his passage to Europe; Mr. Wheler was alone left, who no longer dissented from anything; Mr. Hastings was in effect himself the whole Council. He declared that he had disbursed three lacs of rupees, that is, thirty-four thousand five hundred pounds, in secret services,—which having, he says, "been advanced from my own private cash, I request that the same may be repaid to me in the following manner." He accordingly desires three bonds, for a lac of Sicca rupees each, to be given to him in two of the Company's subscriptions,—one to bear interest on the eight per cent loan, the other two in the four per cent: the bonds were antedated to the beginning of the preceding October. On the 9th of the same month, that is, on the 9th of January, 1781, the three bonds were accordingly ordered.[29] So far the whole transaction appears clear, and of a piece. Private money is subscribed, and a public security is taken for it. When the Company's Treasury accounts[30] are compared with the proceedings of their Council-General, a perfect correspondence also appears. The three bonds are then [there?] entered to Mr. Hastings, and he is credited for principal and interest on them, in the exact terms of the order. So far the official accounts,—which, because of their perfect harmony, are considered as clear and consistent evidence to one body of fact.
The second sort of document relative to these bonds (though the first in order of time) is Mr. Hastings's letter of the 29th of November, 1780.[31] It is written between the time of the expenditure of the money for the Company's use and the taking of the bonds. Here, for the first time, a very material difference appears; and the difference is the more striking, because Mr. Hastings claimed the whole money as his own, and took bonds for it as such, after this representation. The letter to the Company discovers that part of the money (the whole of which he had declared on record to be his own, and for which he had taken bonds) was not his, but the property of his masters, from whom he had taken the security. It is no less remarkable that the letter which represents the money as belonging to the Company was written about six weeks before the Minute of Council in which he claims that money as his own. It is this letter on which your Committee is to remark.
Mr. Hastings, after giving his reasons for the application of the three lacs of rupees, and for his having for some time concealed the fact, says, "Two thirds of that sum I have raised by my own credit, and shall charge it in my official account; the other third I have supplied from the cash in my hands belonging to the Honorable Company."[32]
The House will observe, that in November he tells the Directors that he shall charge only two thirds in his official accounts; in the following January he charges the whole.[33] For the other third, although he admitted that to belong to the Company, we have seen that he takes a bond to himself.
It is material that he tells the Company in his letter that these two lacs of rupees were raised on his credit. His letter to the Council says that they were advanced from his private cash. What he raises on his credit may, on a fair construction, be considered as his own: but in this, too, he fails; for it is certain he has never transferred these bonds to any creditor; nor has he stated any sum he has paid, or for which he stands indebted, on that account, to any specific person. Indeed, it was out of his power; for the first two thirds of the money, which he formerly stated as raised upon his credit, he now confesses to have been from the beginning the Company's property, and therefore could not have been raised on his private credit, or borrowed from any person whatsoever.
To these two accounts, thus essentially varying, he has added a third,[34] varying at least as essentially from both. In his last or third account, which is a statement of all the sums he has received in an extraordinary manner, and confessed to be the Company's property, he reverses the items of his first account, and, instead of allowing the Company but one third and claiming two thirds for himself, he enters two of the bonds, each for a lac of rupees, as belonging to the Company: of the third bond, which appears so distinctly in the Consultations and in the Treasury accounts, not one word is said; ten thousand pounds is absorbed, sinks, and disappears at once, and no explanation whatsoever concerning it is given; Mr. Hastings seems not yet to have decided to whose account it ought to be placed. In this manner his debt to the Company, or the Company's to him, is just what he thinks fit. In a single article he has varied three times. In one account he states the whole to be his own; in another he claims two thirds; in the last he gives up the claim of the two thirds, and says nothing to the remaining portion.
To make amends, however, for the suppression of this third bond, given with the two others in January, 1781, and antedated to the beginning of October, Mr. Hastings, in the above-mentioned general account subjoined to his letter of the 22d May, 1782, has brought to the Company's credit a new bond.[35]
This bond is for 17,000l. It was taken from the Company (and so it appears on their Treasury accounts) on the 23d of November, 1780. He took no notice of this, when, in January following, he called upon his own Council for the three others. What is more extraordinary, he was equally silent with regard to it, when, only six days after its date, he wrote concerning the subject of the three other bonds to the Court of Directors; yet now it comes out, that that bond also was taken by Mr. Hastings from the Company for money which he declares he had received on the Company's account, and that he entered himself as creditor when he ought to have made himself debtor.
Your Committee examined Major Scott concerning this money, which Mr. Hastings must have obtained in some clandestine and irregular mode; but they could obtain no information of the persons from whom it was taken, nor of the occasion or pretence of taking this large sum; nor does any Minute of Council appear for its application to any service. The whole of the transaction, whatever it was, relative to this bond, is covered with the thickest obscurity.