In the first place, I am to remark to your Lordships, that the accounts he has given of one of these sums of money are totally false and contradictory. Now there is not a stronger presumption, nor can one want more reason to judge a transaction fraudulent, than that the accounts given of it are contradictory; and he has given three accounts utterly irreconcilable with each other. He is asked, "How came you to take bonds for this money, if it was not your own? How came you to vitiate and corrupt the state of the Company's records, and to state yourself a lender to the Company, when in reality you were their debtor?" His answer was, "I really cannot tell; I have forgot my reasons; the distance of time is so great," (namely, a time of about two years, or not so long,) "I cannot give an account of the matter; perhaps I had this motive, perhaps I had another," (but what is the most curious,) "perhaps I had none at all which I can now recollect." You shall hear the account which Mr. Hastings himself gives, his own fraudulent representation, of these corrupt transactions. "For my motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of Directors, and for taking bonds for part of these sums and paying others into the treasury as deposits on my own account, I have generally accounted in my letter to the Honorable the Court of Directors of the 22d of May, 1782,--namely, that I either chose to conceal the first receipts from public curiosity by receiving bonds for the amount, or possibly acted without any studied design which my memory at that distance of time could verify, and that I did not think it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest. It will not be expected that I should be able to give a more correct explanation of my intentions after a lapse of three years, having declared at the time that many particulars had escaped my remembrance; neither shall I attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied in that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily, or with a strong probability, follow them."