"I have," says he, "shown by this testimony that I never intended to
make any communication to Cheyt Sing of taking less than the fifty lacs
which in my own mind I had resolved to exact." And he adds,--"I shall
make my last and solemn appeal to the breast of every man who shall read
this, whether it is likely, or morally possible, that I should have tied
down my own future conduct to so decided a process and series of acts,
if I had secretly intended to threaten, or to use a degree of violence,
for no other purpose than to draw from the object of it a mercenary
atonement for my own private emolument, and suffer all this tumult to
terminate in an ostensible and unsubstantial submission to the authority
which I represented."
He had just before said, "If I ever talked of selling the Company's
sovereignty to the Nabob of Oude, it was only _in terrorem_." In the
face of this assertion, he here gives you to understand he never held
out anything _in terrorem_, but what he intended to execute. But we will
show you that in fact he had reserved to himself a power of acting _pro
re nata_, and that he intended to compound or not, just as answered his
purposes upon this occasion. "I admit," he says, "that I did not enter
it [the intention of fining Cheyt Sing] on the Consultations, because it
was not necessary; even this plan itself of the fine was not a fixed
plan, but to be regulated by circumstances, both as to the substantial
execution of it and the mode.
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