of the present year, and crediting them by a sum privately received, which was this of Nobkissin's. If my claim on the Company were not founded in justice, and _bona fide_ due, my acceptance of three lacs of rupees from Nobkissin by no means precludes them from recovering that sum from me. No member of this Honorable House suspects me, I hope, of the meanness and guilt of presenting false accounts." We do not _suspect_ him of presenting false accounts: we can prove, we are now radically proving, that he presents false accounts. We suspect no man who does not give ground for suspicion; we accuse no man who has not given ground for accusation; and we do not attempt to bring before a court of justice any charges which we shall not be able decisively to prove. This will put an end to all idle prattle of malice, of groundless suspicions of guilt, and of ill-founded charges. We come here to bring the matter to the test, and here it shall be brought to the test, between the Commons of Great Britain and this East India delinquent. In his letter of the 21st of February, 1784, he says he has never benefited himself by contingent accounts; and as an excuse for taking this bribe from Nobkissin, which he did not discover at the time, but many years afterwards, at the bar of the House of Commons, he declares that he wanted to apply it to the contingent account for his expenses, that is, for what he pretended to have laid out for the Company, during a great number of years. He proceeds:-- "If it should be objected, that the allowance of these demands would furnish a precedent for others of the like kind, I have to remark, that in their whole amount they are but the aggregate of a contingent account of twelve years; and if it were to become the practice of those who have passed their prime of life in your service, and filled, as I have filled it, the first office of your dominion, to glean from their past accounts all the articles of expense which their inaccuracy or indifference hath overlooked, your interests would suffer infinitely less by the precedent than by a single example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores for your benefit and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of private want and to sink in obscurity."