A war of writs and proclamations raged with increasing violence, until at last the Judges issued a summons against the Government itself. Hastings and his colleagues, strong in their temporary union, treated the summons with contempt.
The whole machinery of civilised rule in Bengal was come in fact to a deadlock, when Hastings set it working again by means of a compromise the happiest that any statesman could have conceived. In October, 1780, he offered Impey, from whom the recent quarrels had for a time estranged him, the Presidency of the Sadr Diwání Adálat, the Company's chief Civil Court, which Hastings had remodelled a few months before. The Chief Justice, in all sincerity, accepted the olive-branch thus opportunely held out by his old friend. This arrangement, which brought peace and order at a critical moment to Bengal, was denounced by Hastings' and Impey's enemies as a fresh crime, and was afterwards described by Macaulay as the giving and taking of a bribe. Bengal was saved, he says, and the Chief Justice became 'rich, quiet, and infamous.' But this sort of language wanders very far from the rulings of common justice and common sense.
Bengal was saved indeed, and the Chief Justice ultimately drew a fair salary in return for useful and arduous work in an office for which he was peculiarly fitted. But the infamy of the matter is the mere child of rhetorical extravagance inspired by party traditions. There was no giving or taking of bribes. Hastings wisely pitched upon the best
