VI. That the said Warren Hastings did also presume to censure and asperse the Court of Directors for the moderate terms in which they had expressed their displeasure against him, as putting him under the necessity of stating in his defence a strong accusation against himself, and as implying in the said Court a consciousness that he was not guilty of the offences charged upon him,--being, as he asserts, in the resolutions of the Court of Directors, "arraigned and prejudged of _a violation of national faith, in acts of such complicated aggravation_, that, _if they were true_, no punishment SHORT OF DEATH could atone for the injury which the interest and credit of the public had sustained in them"; and he did therefore censure the said Court for applying no stronger or more criminating epithets than those of "improper, unwarrantable, and highly impolitic," to an offence so by them charged, and by him described. And though it be true that the expressions aforesaid are much too reserved for the purpose of duly characterizing the offences of the said Hastings, yet was it _in him_ most indecent to libel the Court of Directors for the same; and his implication, from the tenderness of the epithets and descriptions aforesaid used towards him, was not only indecent, but ungrounded, malicious, and scandalous,--he having himself highly, though truly, aggravated "the charge of the injuries done by him to the Rajah of Benares," in order to bring the said Directors into contempt and suspicion, the paragraphs in the said libel being as follow.--"Here I must crave leave to say, that the terms 'improper, unwarrantable, and highly impolitic' are much too gentle, as deductions from such premises; and as every reader of the latter will obviously feel, as he reads, the deductions which inevitably belong to them, I will add, that the strict performance of solemn engagements on one part, followed by acts directly subversive of them and by total dispossession on the other, stamps on the perpetrators of the latter the guilt of the greatest possible violation of faith and justice."--"There is an appearance of tenderness in this deviation from plain construction, of which, however meant, I have a right to complain; because it imposes on me the necessity of framing the terms of the accusation against myself, which you have only not made, but have stated the leading arguments to it so strongly, that no one who reads these can avoid making it, _or not know it to have been intended_."