My Lords, it is no offence that a
Governor-General, or anybody else, has the majority in the Council. To
have the government in himself is no offence. Neither was it any
offence, if you please, that the Nabob was virtually a vassal to the
Company, as he contends he was. For the question is not, what a
Governor-General _may_ do, but what Warren Hastings did do. He who has a
majority in Council, and records his own acts there, may justify these
acts as legal: I mean the mode is legal. But as he executes whatever he
proposes as Governor-General, he is solely responsible for the _nature_
of the acts themselves.
I shall now show your Lordships that Mr. Hastings, finding, as he
states, the Nabob to be made by the treaty in 1775 eventually a vassal
to the Company, has thought proper to make him a vassal to himself, for
his own private purposes. Your Lordships will see what corrupt and
iniquitous purposes they were. In the first place, in order to
annihilate in effect the Council, and to take wholly from them their
control in the affairs of Oude, he suppressed (your Lordships will find
the fact proved in your minutes) the Persian correspondence, which was
the whole correspondence of Oude. This whole correspondence was secreted
by him, and kept from the Council.
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