I must now beg leave to observe to you, that the treaty was made (and I wish your Lordships to advert to dates) in the year 1775; Mr. Hastings acquired the majority in something more than a year afterwards; and therefore, supposing the acts of the former majority to have been ever so iniquitous, their power lasted but a short time. From the year 1776 to 1784 Mr. Hastings had the whole government of Oude in himself, by having the majority in the Council. My Lords, it is no offence that a Governor-General, or anybody else, has the majority in the Council. To have the government in himself is no offence. Neither was it any offence, if you please, that the Nabob was virtually a vassal to the Company, as he contends he was. For the question is not, what a Governor-General _may_ do, but what Warren Hastings did do. He who has a majority in Council, and records his own acts there, may justify these acts as legal: I mean the mode is legal. But as he executes whatever he proposes as Governor-General, he is solely responsible for the _nature_ of the acts themselves. I shall now show your Lordships that Mr. Hastings, finding, as he states, the Nabob to be made by the treaty in 1775 eventually a vassal to the Company, has thought proper to make him a vassal to himself, for his own private purposes. Your Lordships will see what corrupt and iniquitous purposes they were. In the first place, in order to annihilate in effect the Council, and to take wholly from them their control in the affairs of Oude, he suppressed (your Lordships will find the fact proved in your minutes) the Persian correspondence, which was the whole correspondence of Oude. This whole correspondence was secreted by him, and kept from the Council. It was never communicated to the Persian translator of the Company, Mr. Colebrooke, who had a salary for executing that office. It was secreted, and kept in the private cabinet of Mr. Hastings; from the period of 1781 to 1785 no part of it was communicated to the Council. There is nothing, as your Lordships have often found in this trial, that speaks for the man like himself; there is nothing will speak for his conduct like the records of the Company. "_Fort William, 19th February, 1785._ "At a Council: present, the Honorable John Macpherson, Esquire, Governor-General, President, and John Stables, Esquire. * * * * *