That the said Warren Hastings, having in the letter aforesaid contradicted all the grounds and reasons by him assigned for keeping up the aforesaid establishment, and having declared his own conviction that the whole was a fallacy and imposition, and a detriment to the Company instead of a benefit, circumstances (if they are true) which he might and ought to have well known, was guilty of an high crime and misdemeanor in carrying on the imposture and delusion aforesaid, and in continuing an insupportable burden and grievance upon the Nabob for several years, without attending to his repeated supplications to be relieved therefrom, to the utter ruin of his country, and to the destruction of the discipline of the British troops, by diffusing among them a general spirit of peculation; and the said Hastings hath committed a grievous offence in upholding the same pernicious system, until, by his own confession and declaration, in his minute of the 21st of May, 1781, "the evils had _grown_ to so great an height, that exertions will be required more powerful than can be made through the delegated authority of the servants of the Company now in the province, and that he was far from sanguine in his expectations that _even his own endeavors would be attended with much success_." XXVI.

That, at the time of making the said treaty, and at the time when, under color of the distress of the Nabob of Oude, and the failure of all other means for his relief, he, the said Hastings, broke the Company's faith with the parents of the Nabob, and first encouraged and afterwards compelled him to despoil them of their landed estates, money, jewels, and household goods, and while the said Nabob continued heavily in debt to the Company, he, the said Warren Hastings, did, "_without hesitation_," accept of and receive from the Nabob of Oude and his ministers (who are notoriously known to be not only under his influence, but under his absolute command) a bribe, or unlawful gift or present, of one hundred thousand pounds sterling, and upwards.

That, even if the said pretended gift could be supposed to be voluntary, it was contrary to the express provision of the Regulating Act of the 13th year of his Majesty's reign, prohibiting the receipt of all presents upon any pretence whatsoever, and contrary to his own sense of the true intent and meaning of the said act, declared upon a similar, but not so strong a case,--that is, where the service done, and the present offered in return for it, had taken place before the promulgation of the above laws in India: on that occasion he declared, "that the exclusion by an act of Parliament _admitted of no abatement or evasion_, wherever its authority extended." XXVII.

That the said Warren Hastings, confiding in an interest which he supposed himself to have formed in the East India House, did endeavor to prevail on the Court of Directors to violate the said act, and to suffer him to appropriate the money so illegally accepted by him to his own profit, as a reward for his services.
XXVIII.

That the said Warren Hastings has since declared to the Court of Directors, that, when _fortune threw a sum in his way_ (meaning the sum of money above mentioned) _of a magnitude which could not be concealed, he chose to apprise his employers of it_:[15] thereby confessing, that, but for the magnitude of the same rendering it difficult to be concealed, he never would have discovered it to them.