From this and some other articles misreported in a similar way, the partiality of the Secret Committee seemed liable to suspicion. From this imputation they were, however, exculpated by Mr. Jenkinson, afterwards Lord Liverpool, a member of the Committee, who informed the House, that, as the Committee had found it impossible themselves to search for facts among the vast mass of papers at the India House, they had been under the necessity of confiding in the diligence and accuracy of the clerks in the several departments; and that, for the matter then in debate, they had trusted to Mr. Samuel Wilks, the examiner of India correspondence, who appeared to them to be a man of extreme caution and industry. The error in question was one that might have escaped Mr. Wilks quite unintentionally; but it is to be feared that all the errors or misrepresentations were not of the same description: and the circumstances to be stated, may prove what unseen yet formidable difficulties Lord Clive and all who were opposed to the Directors had to contend with, where the effect of a passing, incorrect assertion contained in a single line, was often not to be destroyed, if at all, by long and painful representations of the real circumstances. On the 3d of May, when Lord North moved for leave to bring in his Bill for the better management of the East India Company, Lord Clive solicited the indulgence of the House, while he explained a few facts which had been partially stated in the Reports of the Select Committee. While he defended his own character, he did not spare Lord North nor the Court of Directors. He complained in particular of the mean and dishonest artifices which had been resorted to by some of the Directors to blast his honest fame, and that through the agency of the Committee then sitting. That one gentleman, a member of that House, who had long been the principal manager of the affairs of the East India Company[192], had on the seventh day of November last, in a private conversation with Mr. Hoole, the Auditor-General, told him that he wished for his assistance in a matter that would be particularly serviceable, and desired that he would draw up a complete state of the civil and military charges of Bengal, and likewise the revenues from the time of Lord Clive's arrival in Bengal in 1765; and directed him to refer to all the letters, plans, or regulations of Lord Clive, noting how far the charges, revenues, &c. agreed with them; to trace out the causes of any increase or decrease; to draw up the whole historically and progressively, making all the accounts _his own_; and, as Mr. Sulivan expressed himself, _to mark the man_; concluding that he wished to show that all the distresses of the Company arose from _him_. Lord Clive reminded the House with what caution materials drawn up in such a spirit, and issuing from such a source, were to be received; and how easily, by the effect of so powerful an engine, any man's reputation could be destroyed.