VIII. That, in answer to such laudable wish of the said commander-in-chief, the President, Warren Hastings, preferring his own prohibited plans of extended dominion to the mild, equitable, and wise policy inculcated in the standing orders of his superiors, and now enforced by the recommendation of the commander-in-chief, did instruct and "desire" him, the said commander-in-chief, "instead of soliciting the Vizier to relinquish his conquest to Fyzoola Khan, to discourage it as much as was in his power"; although the said Hastings did not once express, or even intimate, any doubt whatever of the Nabob Fyzoola Khan's innocence as to the origin of the war, or of his hereditary right to the territories which he claimed, but to the said pleas of the Nabob Fyzoola Khan, as well as to the arguments both of policy and justice advanced by the commander-in-chief, he, the said Hastings, did solely oppose certain speculative objects of imagined expediency, summing up his decided rejection of the proposals made by the Nabob Fyzoola Khan in the following remarkable words. "With respect to Fyzoola Khan, _he appears not to merit our consideration. The petty sovereign of a country estimated at six or eight lacs ought not for a moment to prove an impediment to any of our measures, or to affect the consistency of our conduct_." IX. That, in the aforesaid violent and arbitrary position, the said Warren Hastings did avow it to be a public principle of his government, that no right, however manifest, and no innocence, however unimpeached, could entitle the weak to our protection against others, or save them from our own active endeavors for their oppression, and even extirpation, should they interfere with our notions of political expediency; and that such a principle is highly derogatory to the justice and honor of the English name, and fundamentally injurious to our interests, inasmuch as it hath an immediate tendency to excite distrust, jealousy, fear, and hatred against us among all the subordinate potentates of Hindostan.