Warren Hastings, and did offer and engage to prove and establish the
same by sufficient evidence. That this account is stated with a minute
particularity and precision; the date of each payment, down to that of
small sums, is specified; the various coins in which such payments were
severally made are distinguished; and the different persons through
whose hands the money passed into those of the said Warren Hastings are
named. That such particularity on the face of such a charge, supposing
it false, is favorable to the party wrongfully accused, and exposes the
accuser to an instant and easy detection: for, though, as the said
Warren Hastings himself has observed on another occasion, "papers may be
forged, and evidences may appear in numbers to attest them, yet it must
always be an _easy_ matter to detect the falsity of any forged paper
produced by examining the witnesses separately, and subjecting them to a
subsequent cross-examination, in which case, if false, they will not be
able to persevere in one regular, consistent story "; whereas, if no
advantage be taken of such particularity in the charge to detect the
falsehood thereof, and if no attempt to disprove it, and no defence
whatever be made, a presumption justly and reasonably arises in favor of
the truth of such charge. That the said Warren Hastings, instead of
offering anything in his defence, declared that _he would not suffer
Nundcomar to appear before the board at his accuser_; that he attempted
to indict his said accuser for a conspiracy, in which he failed; and
that the said Rajah Nundcomar was soon after, and while his charge
against the said Warren Hastings was depending before the Council,
indicted upon an English penal statute, which does not extend even to
Scotland,[1] before the Supreme Court of Judicature, for an offence said
to have been committed several years before, and not capital by the laws
of India, and was condemned and executed. That the evidence of this man,
not having been encountered at the time when it might and ought to have
been by the said Warren Hastings, remains justly in force against him,