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[42] They acted more properly in refusing to
confirm this grant to Mr. Hastings, and in choosing rather to refer him
to the law which he had violated than to his own sense of what he
thought he was entitled to take from the natives: putting him in mind
that the Regulating Act had expressly declared "that no
Governor-General, or any of the Council, shall, directly or indirectly,
accept, receive, or take, of or from any person or persons, or on any
account whatsoever, any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward,
pecuniary or otherwise, or any promise or engagement for any of the
aforesaid." Here is no reserve for the case of a disclosure to the
Directors, and for the legalizing the breach of an act of Parliament by
their subsequent consent. The illegality attached to the action at its
very commencement, and it could never be afterwards legalized: the
Directors had no such power reserved to them. Words cannot be devised of
a stronger import or studied with more care. To these words of the act
are opposed the declaration and conduct of Mr.


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