Read Ebook: The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke Vol. 08 (of 12) by Burke Edmund

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stings, of his having paid in near two lacs of rupees at that time, was not true; or that the sub-treasurer may receive great sums in deposit without entering them in the Company's Treasury accounts; or that the Treasury books themselves are records not to be depended on; or, lastly, that faithful copies of these books of accounts are not transmitted to Europe. The defect of an entry corresponding with Mr. Hastings's declaration in Council can be attributed only to one of these four causes,--of which the want of foundation in his recorded assertion, though very blamable, is the least alarming.

The apology is brief indeed, considering the nature of the transaction; and what is more material than its length or its shortness, it is in all points unsatisfactory. The matter becomes, if possible, more obscure by his explanation. Here was money received by Mr. Hastings, which, according to his own judgment, he had no right to receive; it was money which, "but for the occasion that prompted him, he could not have accepted"; it was money which came into his, and from his into the Company's hands, by ways and means undescribed, and from persons unnamed: yet, though apprehensive of false conclusions and purposed misrepresentations, he gives his employers no insight whatsoever into a matter which of all others stood in the greatest need of a full and clear elucidation.

Although he chooses to omit this essential point, he expresses the most anxious solicitude to clear himself of the charges that might be made against him, of the artifices of ostentation, and of corrupt influence. To discover, if possible, the ground for apprehending such imputations, your Committee adverted to the circumstances in which he stood at the time: they found that this letter was dispatched about the time that Mr. Francis took his passage for England; his fear of misrepresentation may therefore allude to something which passed in conversation between him and that gentleman at the time the offer was made.

It was not easy, on the mere face of his offer, to give an ill turn to it. The act, as it stands on the Minute, is not only disinterested, but generous and public-spirited. If Mr. Hastings apprehended misrepresentation from Mr. Francis, or from any other person, your Committee conceive that he did not employ proper means for defeating the ill designs of his adversaries. On the contrary, the course he has taken in his letter to the Court of Directors is calculated to excite doubts and suspicions in minds the most favorably disposed to him. Some degree of ostentation is not extremely blamable at a time when a man advances largely from his private fortune towards the public service. It is human infirmity at the worst, and only detracts something from the lustre of an action in itself meritorious. The kind of ostentation which is criminal, and criminal only because it is fraudulent, is where a person makes a show of giving when in reality he does not give. This imposition is criminal more or less according to the circumstances. But if the money received to furnish such a pretended gift is taken from any third person without right to take it, a new guilt, and guilt of a much worse quality and description, is incurred. The Governor-General, in order to keep clear of ostentation, on the 29th of November, 1780, declares, that the sum of money which he offered on the 26th of the preceding June as his own was not his own, and that he had no right to it. Clearing himself of vanity, he convicts himself of deceit, and of injustice.

In the letter which accompanied that very extraordinary account, which then for the first time appeared, he discovers no small solicitude to clear himself from the imputation of having these discoveries drawn from him by the terrors of the Parliamentary inquiries then on foot. To remove all suspicion of such a motive for making these discoveries, Mr. Larkins swears, in an affidavit made before Mr. Justice Hyde, bearing even date with the letter which accompanies the account, that is, of the 16th of December, 1782, that this letter had been written by him on the 22d of May, several months before it was dispatched. It appears that Mr. Larkins, who makes this voluntary affidavit, is neither secretary to the board, nor Mr. Hastings's private secretary, but an officer of the Treasury of Bengal.

The Governor-General's letter is dated the 22d May, and the "Resolution" was the last ship of the season dispatched for Europe. The public letters to the Directors are dated the 9th May; but it appears by the letter of the commander of the ship that he did not receive his dispatches from Mr. Lloyd, then at Kedgeree, until the 26th May, and also that the pilot was not discharged from the ship until the 11th June. Some of these presents had been received eighteen months preceding the date of this letter,--none less than four months; so that, in fact, he might have sent this account by all the ships of that season; but the Governor-General chose to write this letter thirteen days after the determination in Council for the dispatch of the last ship.

If the letter of the 22d May had been found in the list of packets sent by the Resolution, the Governor General would have established in a satisfactory manner, and far beyond the effect of any affidavit, that the letter had been written at the time of the date. It appears that the Resolution, being on her voyage to England, met with so severe a gale of wind as to be obliged to put back to Bengal, and to unload her cargo. This event makes no difference in the state of the transaction. Whatever the cause of these new discoveries might have been, at the time of sending them the fact of the Parliamentary inquiry was publicly known.

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 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, 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 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 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.

These three authorities, which your Committee has accurately compared, are, first, his minutes on the Consultations; secondly, his letter to the Court of Directors on the 29th of November, 1780; thirdly, his account, transmitted on the 16th of December, 1782.

To these two accounts, thus essentially varying, he has added a third, 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.

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.

Mr. Hastings, to palliate the blame of his conduct, declares that he has not received any interest on these bonds,--and that he has indorsed them as not belonging to himself, but to the Company. As to the first part of this allegation, whether he received the interest or let it remain in arrear is a matter of indifference, as he entitled himself to it; and so far as the legal security he has taken goes, he may, whenever he pleases, dispose both of principal and interest. What he has indorsed on the bonds, or when he made the indorsement, or whether in fact he has made it at all, are matters known only to himself; for the bonds must be in his possession, and are nowhere by him stated to be given up or cancelled,--which is a thing very remarkable, when he confesses that he had no right to receive them.

These bonds make but a part of the account of private receipts of money by Mr. Hastings, formerly paid into the Treasury as his own property, and now allowed not to be so. This account brings into view other very remarkable matters of a similar nature and description.

That the House may be apprised of the nature of this article of deposit, it may not be improper to state that the Company receive into their treasury the cash of private persons, placed there as in a bank. On this no interest is paid, and the party depositing has a right to receive it upon demand. Under this head of account no public money is ever entered. Mr. Hastings, neither at making the deposit as his own, nor at the time of his disclosure of the real proprietor, has given any information of the persons from whom this money had been received. Mr. Scott was applied to by your Committee, but could not give any more satisfaction in this particular than in those relative to the bonds.

The title of the account of the 22d of May purports not only that those sums were paid into the Company's treasury by Mr. Hastings's order, but that they were applied to the Company's service. No service is specified, directly or by any reference, to which this great sum of money has been applied.

Your Committee, on turning to the account of Durbar charges in the ledger of that month, find the sum, as stated in the account of May 22d, to be indeed paid in; but there is no specific application whatsoever entered.

With regard to the application of this last sum of money, which is said to be carried to the Durbar charges of April, 1782, your Committee are not enabled to make any observations on it, as the account of that period has not yet arrived.

"When the knife," says he, "had penetrated to the bone, and I was surrounded with such heavy distresses that I could no longer live in expectations, I wrote you an account of my difficulties.

The truth of all these representations is nowhere contested by Mr. Hastings. It is, indeed, admitted in something stronger than words; for, upon account of the Nabob's condition, and the no less distressed condition of his dominions, he thought it fit to withdraw from him and them a large body of the Company's troops, together with all the English of a civil description, who were found no less burdensome than the military. This was done on the declared inability of the country any longer to support them,--a country not much inferior to England in extent and fertility, and, till lately at least, its equal in population and culture.

It was to a prince, in a state so far remote from freedom, authority, and opulence, so penetrated with the treatment he had received, and the behavior he had met with from Mr. Hastings, that Mr. Hastings has chosen to attribute a disposition so very generous and munificent as, of his own free grace and mere motion, to make him a present, at one donation, of upwards of one hundred thousand pounds sterling. This vast private donation was given at the moment of vast instant demands severely exacted on account of the Company, and accumulated on immense debts to the same body,--and all taken from a ruined prince and almost desolated territory.

The legislature, in declaring all presents to be the property of the Company, could not consider corruption, extortion, and fraud as any part of their resources. The property in such presents was declared to be theirs, not as a fund for their benefit, but in order to found a legal title to a civil suit. It was declared theirs, to facilitate the recovery out of corrupt and oppressive hands of money illegally taken; but this legal fiction of property could not nor ought by the legislature to be considered in any other light than as a trust held by them for those who suffered the injury. Upon any other construction, the Company would have a right, first, to extract money from the subjects or dependants of this kingdom committed to their care, by means of particular conventions, or by taxes, by rents, and by monopolies; and when they had exhausted every contrivance of public imposition, then they were to be at liberty to let loose upon the people all their servants, from the highest rank to the lowest, to prey upon them at pleasure, and to draw, by personal and official authority, by influence, venality, and terror, whatever was left to them,--and that all this was justified, provided the product was paid into the Company's exchequer.

This prohibition and permission of presents, with this declaration of property in the Company, would leave no property to any man in India. If, however, it should be thought that this clause in the act should be capable, by construction and retrospect, of so legalizing and thus appropriating these presents, it is absolutely necessary that it should be very fully explained.

The provision in the act was made in favor of the natives. If such construction prevails, the provision made as their screen from oppression will become the means of increasing and aggravating it without bounds and beyond remedy. If presents, which when they are given were unlawful, can afterwards be legalized by an application of them to the Company's service, no sufferer can even resort to a remedial process at law for his own relief. The moment he attempts to sue, the money may be paid into the Company's treasury; it is then lawfully taken, and the party is non-suited.

The Company itself must suffer extremely in the whole order and regularity of their public accounts, if the idea upon which Mr. Hastings justifies the taking of these presents receives the smallest countenance. On his principles, the same sum may become private property or public, at the pleasure of the receiver; it is in his power, Mr. Hastings says, to conceal it forever. He certainly has it in his power not only to keep it back and bring it forward at his own times, but even to shift and reverse the relations in the accounts in what manner and proportion seems good to him, and to make himself alternately debtor or creditor for the same sums.

This matter has appeared, and has furnished, as it ought to do, something more serious than conjectures. It would in any other case be supposed that Mr. Hastings, expecting such inquiries, and considering that the questions are far from frivolous, would condescend to give some information upon them; but the conclusion of a sentence so importantly begun, and which leads to such expectations, is, "that to these conjectures it would be of little use to reply." This is all he says to public conjecture.

To the Court of Directors he is very little more complaisant, and not at all more satisfactory; he states merely as a supposition their inquiry concerning matters of which he positively knew that they had called for an explanation. He knew it, because he presumed to censure them for doing so. To the hypothesis of a further inquiry he gives a conjectural answer of such a kind as probably, in an account of a doubtful transaction, and to a superior, was never done before.

He here professes not to be certain of the motives by which he was himself actuated in so extraordinary a concealment, and in the use of such extraordinary means to effect it; and as if the acts in question were those of an absolute stranger, and not his own, he gives various loose conjectures concerning the motive to them. He even supposes, in taking presents contrary to law, and in taking bonds for them as his own, contrary to what he admits to be truth and fact, that he might have acted without any distinct motive at all, or at least such as his memory could reach at that distance of time. That immense distance, in the faintness of which his recollection is so completely lost as to set him guessing at his motives for his own conduct, was from the 15th of January, 1781, when the bonds at his own request were given, to the date of this letter, which is the 22d of May, 1782,--that is to say, about one year and four months.

As to the first of these extraordinary positions, your Committee cannot conceive what motive could actuate any native of India dependent on the Company, in assisting them privately, and in refusing to assist them publicly. If the transaction was fair and honest, every native must have been desirous of making merit with the great governing power. If he gave his money as a free gift, he might value himself upon very honorable and very acceptable service; if he lent it on the Company's bonds, it would still have been of service, and he might also receive eight per cent for his money. No native could, without some interested view, give to the Governor-General what he would refuse to the Company as a grant, or even as a loan. It is plain that the powers of government must, in some way or other, be understood by the natives to be at sale. The Governor-General says that he took the money with an original destination to the purposes to which he asserts he has since applied it. But this original destination was in his own mind only,--not declared, nor by him pretended to be declared, to the party who gave the presents, and who could perceive nothing in it but money paid to the supreme magistrate for his private emolument. All that the natives could possibly perceive in such a transaction must be highly dishonorable to the Company's government; for they must conceive, when they gave money to Mr. Hastings, that they bought from Mr. Hastings either what was their own right or something that was not so, or that they redeemed themselves from some acts of rigor inflicted, threatened, or apprehended. If, in the first case, Mr. Hastings gave them the object for which they bargained, his act, however proper, was corrupt,--if he did not, it was both corrupt and fraudulent; if the money was extorted by force or threats, it was oppressive and tyrannical. The very nature of such transactions has a tendency to teach the natives to pay a corrupt court to the servants of the Company; and they must thereby be rendered less willing, or less able, or perhaps both, to fulfil their engagements to the state. Mr. Scott's evidence asserts that they would rather give to Mr. Hastings than lend to the Company. It is very probable; but it is a demonstration of their opinion of his power and corruption, and of the weak and precarious state of the Company's authority.

The second principle assumed by Mr. Hastings for his justification, namely, that factious opposition and a divided government might create exigencies requiring such supplies, is full as dangerous as the first; for, if, in the divisions which must arise in all councils, one member of government, when he thinks others factiously disposed, shall be entitled to take money privately from the subject for the purposes of his politics, and thereby to dispense with an act of Parliament, pretences for that end cannot be wanting. A dispute may always be raised in council in order to cover oppression and peculation elsewhere. But these principles of Mr. Hastings tend entirely to destroy the character and functions of a council, and to vest them in one of the dissentient members. The law has placed the sense of the whole in the majority; and it is not a thing to be suffered, that any of the members should privately raise money for the avowed purpose of defeating that sense, or for promoting designs that are contrary to it: a more alarming assumption of power in an individual member of any deliberative or executive body cannot be imagined. Mr. Hastings had no right, in order to clear himself of peculation, to criminate the majority with faction. No member of any body, outvoted on a question, has, or can have, a right to direct any part of his public conduct by that principle. The members of the Council had a common superior, to whom they might appeal in their mutual charges of faction: they did so frequently; and the imputation of faction has almost always been laid on Mr. Hastings himself.

In this inquiry, by far the most important abuse which appeared on any of the above heads was that which was charged relative to the sale in gross by Mr. Hastings of nothing less than the whole authority of the country government in the disposal of the guardianship of the Nabob of Bengal.

The present Nabob, Mobarek ul Dowlah, was a minor when he succeeded to the title and office of Subahdar of the three provinces in 1770. Although in a state approaching to subjection, still his rank and character were important. Much was necessarily to depend upon a person who was to preserve the moderation of a sovereign not supported by intrinsic power, and yet to maintain the dignity necessary to carry on the representation of political government, as well as the substance of the whole criminal justice of a great country. A good education, conformably to the maxims of his religion and the manners of his people, was necessary to enable him to fill that delicate place with reputation either to the Mahometan government or to ours. He had still to manage a revenue not inconsiderable, which remained as the sole resource for the languishing dignity of persons any way distinguished in rank among Mussulmen, who were all attached and clung to him. These considerations rendered it necessary to put his person and affairs into proper hands. They ought to have been men who were able by the gravity of their rank and character to preserve his morals from the contagion of low and vicious company,--men who by their integrity and firmness might be enabled to resist in some degree the rapacity of Europeans, as well as to secure the remaining fragments of his property from the attempts of the natives themselves, who must lie under strong temptation of taking their share in the last pillage of a decaying house.

The Directors were fully impressed with the necessity of such an arrangement. Your Committee find, that, on the 26th of August, 1771, they gave instructions to the President and Council to appoint "a minister to transact the political affairs of the circar ,--and to select for that purpose some person well qualified for the affairs of government to be the minister of the government, and guardian of the Nabob's minority."

The order was so distinct as not to admit of a mistake; it was provident and well considered; and the trust which devolved on Mr. Hastings was of such a nature as might well stimulate a man sensible to reputation to fulfil it in a manner agreeably to the directions he had received, and not only above just cause of exception, but out of the reach of suspicion and malice. In that situation it was natural to suppose he would cast his eyes upon men of the first repute and consideration among the Mussulmen of high rank.

Mr. Hastings, instead of directing his eyes to the durbar, employed his researches in the seraglio. In the inmost recesses of that place he discovered a woman secluded from the intercourse and shut up from the eyes of men, whom he found to correspond with the orders he had received from the Directors, as a person well "qualified for the affairs of government, fit to be a minister of government and the guardian of the Nabob's minority." This woman he solemnly invests with these functions. He appoints Rajah Gourdas, whom some time after he himself qualified with a description of a young man of mean abilities, to be her duan, or steward of the household. The rest of the arrangement was correspondent to this disposition of the principal offices.

It seems not to have been lawful or warrantable in Mr. Hastings to set aside the arrangement positively prescribed by the Court of Directors, which evidently pointed to a man, not to any woman whatever. As a woman confined in the female apartment, the lady he appointed could not be competent to hold or qualified to exercise any active employment: she stood in need of guardians for herself, and had not the ability for the guardianship of a person circumstanced as the Subah was. General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis declare in their minute, "that they believe there never was an instance in India of such a trust so disposed of." Mr. Hastings has produced no precedent in answer to this objection.

It will be proper to state to the House the situation and circumstances of the women principally concerned, who were in the seraglio of Jaffier Ali Kh?n at his death. The first of these was called Munny Begum, a person originally born of poor and obscure parents, who delivered her over to the conductress of a company of dancing girls; in which profession being called to exhibit at a festival, the late Nabob took a liking to her, and, after some cohabitation, she obtained such influence over him that he took her for one of his wives and put her at the head of his harem; and having a son by her, this son succeeded to his authority and estate,--Munny Begum, the mother, being by his will a devisee of considerable sums of money, and other effects, on which he left a charge, which has since been applied to the service of the East India Company. The son of this lady dying, and a son by another wife succeeding, and dying also, the present Nabob, Mobarek ul Dowlah, son by a third wife, succeeded. This woman was then alive, and in the seraglio.

It was Munny Begum that Mr. Hastings chose, and not the natural mother of the Nabob. Whether, having chosen a woman in defiance of the Company's orders, and in passing by the natural parent of the minor prince, he was influenced by respect for the disposition made by the deceased Nabob during his life, or by other motives, the House will determine upon a view of the facts which follow. It will be matter of inquiry, when the question is stated upon the appointment of a stepmother in exclusion of the parent, whether the usage of the East constantly authorizes the continuance of that same distribution of rank and power which was settled in the seraglio during the life of a deceased prince, and which was found so settled at his death, and afterwards, to the exclusion of the mother of the successor. In case of female guardianship, her claim seems to be a right of Nature, and which nothing but a very clear positive law will authorize the departure from. The history of Munny Begum is stated on the records of the Council-General, and no attempt made by Mr. Hastings to controvert the truth of it.

That was charged by the majority of Council to have happened which might be expected inevitably to happen: the care of the Nabob's education was grossly neglected, and his fortune as grossly mismanaged and embezzled. What connection this waste and embezzlement had with the subsequent events the House will judge.

On the 9th of May it was resolved by a majority of the board, against the opinion and solemn protest of the Governor-General, that a gentleman should be sent up to the city of Moorshedabad to demand of Munny Begum the accounts of the nizamut and household, from April, 1764, to the latest period to which they could be closed, and to divest the Begum of the office of guardian to the Nabob; and Mr. Charles Goring was appointed for this purpose.

The preceding facts are stated to the House, not as the foundation of an inquiry into the conduct of the Begum, but as they lead to and are therefore necessary to explain by what means a discovery was made of a sum of money given by her to Mr. Hastings.

Mr. Goring's first letter from the city, dated 17th May, 1775, mentions, among other particulars, the young Nabob's joy at being delivered out of the hands of Munny Begum, of the mean and indigent state of confinement in which he was kept by her, of the distress of his mother, and that he had told Mr. Goring that the "Begum's eunuch had instructed the servants not to suffer him to learn anything by which he might make himself acquainted with business": and he adds, "Indeed, I believe there is great truth in it, as his Excellency seems to be ignorant of almost everything a man of his rank ought to know,--not from a want of understanding, but of being properly educated."

On the 21st of May, Mr. Goring transmitted to the Governor-General and Council an account of sums given by the Begum under her seal, delivered to Mr. Goring by the Nabob in her apartments. The account is as follows.

Memorandum of Disbursements to English Gentlemen, from the Nabob's Sircar, in the Bengal Year 1179.

To the Governor, Mr. Hastings, for an entertainment 1,50,000

The substance of the Governor's proposal was agreed to.

Mr. Goring's answer to this requisition of the board is as follows.

"In compliance with your orders to explain the delivery of the paper containing an account of three lacs of rupees, I am to inform you, it took its rise from a message sent me by the Begum, requesting I would interest myself with the Nabob to have Akbar Ali Kh?n released to her for a few hours, having something of importance to communicate to me, on which she wished to consult him. Thinking the service might be benefited by it, I accordingly desired the Nabob would be pleased to deliver him to my charge, engaging to return him the same night,--which I did. I heard no more till next day, when the Begum requested to see his Excellency and myself, desiring Akbar Ali might attend.

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