XXIV. That, besides the depositions of persons interested in the ruin of the Rajah, others were made by persons who then received pensions from him, the said Hastings; and several of the affidavits were made by persons of mean condition, and so wholly illiterate as not to be able to write their names. XXV. That he, the said Hastings, did also cause to be examined by various proofs and essays, the result of which was delivered in upon honor, the quality of certain military stores taken by the British troops from the said Rajah of Benares; and upon the report that the same were of a good quality, and executed by persons conversant in the making of good military stores, although the cannon was stated by the same authority to be bad, he, the said Warren Hastings, from the report aforesaid, did maliciously, and contrary to the principles of natural and legal reason, infer that the insurrection which had been raised by his own violence and oppression, and rendered for a time successful by his own improvidence, was the consequence of a premeditated design to overturn the British empire in India, and to exterminate therefrom the British nation; which design, if it had been true, the said Hastings might have known, or rationally conjectured, and ought to have provided against. And if the said Hastings had received any credible information of such design, it was his duty to lay the same before the Council Board, and to state the same to the Rajah, when he was in a condition to have given an answer thereto or to observe thereon, and not, after he had proscribed and driven him from his dominions, to have inquired into offences to justify the previous infliction of punishment.