But was it an entertainment upon a visit? Was Mr. Hastings upon a visit? No: he was executing a commission for the Company in a village in the neighborhood of Moorshedabad, and by no means upon a visit to the Nabob. On the contrary, he was upon something that might be more properly called a _visitation_. He came as a heavy calamity, like a famine or a pestilence on a country; he came there to do the severest act in the world,--as he himself expresses, to take the bread, literally the bread, from above a thousand of the nobles of the country, and to reduce them to a situation which no man can hear of without shuddering. When you consider, that, while he was thus entertained himself, he was famishing fourteen hundred of the nobility and gentry of the country, you will not conceive it to be any extenuation of his crimes, that he was there, not upon a visit, but upon a duty, the harshest that could be executed, both to the persons who executed and the people who suffered from it.
It is mentioned and supposed in the observations upon this case, though no circumstances relative to the persons or the nature of the visit are stated, that this expense was something which he might have charged to the Company and did not. It is first supposed by the learned counsel who made the observation, that it was a public, allowed, and acknowledged thing; then, that he had not charged the Company anything for it. I have looked into that business. In the first place, I see no such custom; and if there was such a custom, there was the most abusive misemployment of it. I find that in that year there was paid from the Company's cash account to the Governor's travelling charges (and he had no other journey at that end of the year) thirty thousand rupees, which is about 3,000_l._; and when we consider that he was in the receipt of near 30,000_l._, besides the nuzzers, which amount to several thousand a year, and that he is allowed 3,000_l._ by the Company for his travelling expenses, is it right to charge upon the miserable people whom he was defrauding of their bread 16,000_l._ for his entertainment?
I find that there are also other great sums relative to the expenses of the Committee of Circuit, which he was upon. How much of them is applicable to him I know not. I say, that the allowance of three thousand pounds was noble and liberal; for it is not above a day or two's journey to Moorshedabad, and by his taking his road by Kishenagur he could not be longer. He had a salary to live upon, and he must live somewhere; and he was actually paid three thousand pounds for travelling charges for three months, which was at the rate of twelve thousand pounds a year: a large and abundant sum.