since taken any steps to disprove or refute the same. That the said
Warren Hastings, so long ago as September, 1775, assured the Court of
Directors, "that it was his fixed determination most fully and
liberally to explain every circumstance of his conduct on the points on
which he had been injuriously arraigned, and to afford them the clearest
conviction of his own integrity, and of the propriety of his motives for
declining a present defence of it"; and having never since given to the
Court of Directors any explanation whatever, much less the full and
liberal explanation he had promised so repeatedly, has thereby abandoned
even that late and protracted defence which he himself must have thought
necessary to be made at some time or other, and which he would be
thought to have deferred to a period more suitable and convenient than
that in which the facts were recent, and the impression of these and
other charges of the same nature against him was fresh and unimpaired in
the minds of men.

That on the 30th of March, 1775, a member of the Council produced and
laid before the board a petition from Mir Zein Abul Deen, (formerly
farmer of a district, and who had been in creditable stations,) setting
forth, that Khân Jehan Khân, then Phousdar of Hoogly, had obtained that
office from the said Warren Hastings, with a salary of seventy-two
thousand sicca rupees a year, and that the said _Phousdar had given a
receipt of bribe to the patron of the city_, meaning Warren Hastings, to
pay him annually thirty-six thousand rupees a year, and also to his
banian, Cantoo Baboo, four thousand rupees a year, out of the salary
above mentioned. That by the thirty-fifth article of the instructions
given to the Governor-General and Council, they are directed
"immediately to cause the strictest inquiry to be made into all
oppressions which might have been committed either against the natives
or Europeans, and into all abuses that might have prevailed in the