the tendency to impute low motives; but on the other hand, he was exposed to the errors which will always be liable to arise from this very freedom: for, in the affairs of life, the judgments of mankind are much enlightened by a familiar experience in low motives. Mr Burke's mind stood in a higher atmosphere; his were the faults and perfections of those who see and reason for themselves. His own motives were too noble for suspicion-his sense of right too deep to suffer him to be quick in perceiving the common want of real sympathy in other minds; but the very same cause rendered his indignation fierce and longbreathed when he found perfidy, injustice, and the violation of those principles of right to which he found it hard to conceive any one indifferent. In these considerations may be found the explanation of much of his conduct, on which we have now to enter:-and it may be useful also to recall another feature, which should be seen in connexion with them, as it must lead to an important distinction. His mind was engrossed with large and important questions, and it is from the consideration of these that his conduct with regard to his party is to be judged. He belonged to his principles and not to his party; his party was adhered to for its subserviency to his general views. On questions of small moment, he did not exercise any discretion: such an unqualified freedom would admit of no combined action.

It was indeed owing chiefly to this last mentioned tendency of mind that Mr Burke so long continued to be entangled with the degenerated party of which he had long been the leader-bound by habits of action and intercourse, as well as by strong affections and a constancy of temper that was slow to admit any thought of change, he still was carried on in the channels of old alliance, so long as none of the great questions and fundamental views on which his political creed rested became the cause of disunion. As Mr Burke has been, with much acrimony, accused of inconsistency, it is our design to refer the following incidents of his political life to the principle mainly involved in this statement that he throughout adhered to his political creed, with a constancy rarely to be equalled, and a tenacity approaching to excess: and that he could not have adhered to his party without abandoning his principles, and lowering his reputation. In matters of inferior moment alone was he ever a partisan; in every important question he himself gave the direction to his party. They deserted their leader, and not he them.

One great incident of his life, was the means of prolonging his connexion with the Fox party, long after he had begun to dissent from their views: it was the trial of Warren Hastings. It was and is still the ground of much severe censure, and was the means of imbittering his declining years. To relate its principal circumstances a little more fully, though still too briefly, we pass over numerous details of inferior moment.

The history of British India is well known, how, in the course of a century, a vast and magnificent empire grew up from a petty factory. To comprehend more thoroughly the great questions to which we must advert, some attention must be paid to the means by which this empire grew up, and its very peculiar constitution. In its first growth it was painfully and laboriously fostered by all the arts of

circumvention and diplomatic address: gaining ground at home by intrigue and bribery-in India by tolerance won from the native princes, both on account of its weakness from which no danger was apprehended-and from the wealth which it poured into their coffers. Enlarging its borders by favour and purchase, often experiencing reverses from the fluctuations of party, from dissensions, from the awakened suspicions and perfidious cruelty of the native kings, from the intrigues of rival settlers, Dutch, Portuguese, and French; it still gained ground through numerous vicissitudes and emergencies, but in all by a policy, and against a policy, which made fraud and treachery prescriptive principles. From the factory of Surat to the Presidency of Calcutta, its progress was a continued struggle of force and stratagem, in which each party engaged on either side had recourse to proceedings which appeared to sanction similar retaliations. At last by the bravery and military genius of one great man, the empire of British East India was placed on a broad basis of superior strength, rivals were overawed and reduced, and the native rulers, from being protectors, became by their own crimes and errors protected and depend

Right, as has often happened in the course of time, had slowly changed sides; but a conventional system had also been established, in which all the notions of European equity were unknown. Of this, it seems to have been the latent but well understood principle, that any stretch of fraud and violence was justified by the safety of a great empire, as well as by the fraud and violence against which it was necessary to maintain it. This anomalous policy gave rise to, sanctioned, and was supported by, a pervading dissoluteness in the whole commercial intercourse of the settlement. From the President's council to the office of the lowest clerk, bribery was legitimated; the natural corruptibility of men, sanctioned and excited by habits and understandings, took a novel, and perhaps unprecedented range; so that deeds were done without shame or question, of which the very slightest imputation in England would convey infamy. The following representation is the forcible portraiture of Mr Burke himself. "The natives scarcely know what it is to see the grey head of an Englishman. Young men (boys almost,) govern there without society, and almost without sympathy with the natives. They have no more social habits with the people than if they still resided in England; nor, indeed, any species of intercourse, but that which is necessary to making a sudden fortune, with a view to a remote settlement. Animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in, one after another; wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting.

*

*

*

*

There is nothing in the boys we send to India worse than the boys whom we are whipping at school, or that we see trailing a pike, or bending over a desk at home. But as English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither

nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for remedy of the excesses of their premature power. The consequences of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably such,) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries of India are given to the waves and winds, to be blown about in every breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing ocean. In India all the vices operate by which sudden fortune is acquired. In England are often displayed by the same persons the virtues which dispense hereditary wealth: arrived in England, the destroyers of the nobility and gentry of a whole kingdom will find the best company in this nation at a board of elegance and hospitality. Here the manufacturer and husbandman will bless the just and punctual hand that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasant of Bengal, or wrung from him the very opium in which he forgot his oppression and his oppressor. They marry into your families—they enter into your senate-they ease your estate by loans—they raise their value by demand-they cherish and protect your relations which lie heavy on your patronage—and there is scarcely a house in the kingdom that does not feel some concern and interest that makes all reform of our eastern government appear officious and disgusting; and, on the whole, a most discouraging attempt;—in such an attempt you hurt those who are able to return kindness, or to resent injury. If you succeed, you save those who cannot so much as give you thanks."

From these considerations, the difficulty which seems to rest upon the history of the trial of Mr Hastings, may be satisfactorily explained to any one whose mind is disengaged from the prejudices which have obscured it. They will on one side account for the strong impression which existed among many respectable parties that Mr Hastings was hardly treated: on the other, they add strong corroboration to the opinion, (otherwise, indeed, amply verified,) that there was clear and decided grounds to warrant Mr Burke's conduct, without the necessity of any derogatory explanation.

There were, in fact, strong pleas in justification of Mr Hastings, and such as would fully palliate any enormity in the eyes of the mere public, and still more of the interested few. It appeared, as it ever will appear, a hardship to be the first singled out to suffer the penalty of long sanctioned offences. For men seldom weigh offences by the strict scale of right and wrong, but by prejudice and habit. It seemed partial, because it was new and singular; anomalous, because it was not the law as confirmed by practice. The iniquitous conduct of a long conventional policy was suddenly arrested in the person of an individual, in whose administration it rose to an unusual degree of atrocity. But there were other grounds of palliation: the conduct for which Mr Hastings was assailed, was strongly vindicated by the circumstances. The total absence of sordid and selfish motives-the strong emergencies which demanded it—and generally the fact that it was prescribed, not only by the interests of the company, whose servant he was-but by those of the British population in India, and by those of England. On the other side, such considerations were not those likely to have

any weight in the judgment of Mr Burke. He was by no means severe or fastidious in over strictly balancing the ordinary delinquencies of private men, and little inclined to harshness, or even unreasonable strictness in private transactions; because his views and even his passions were framed upon an unusually broad and extensive scale. Conversant by nature and habit with wide theories and large questions, he had strong habitual impressions upon those comprehensive truths which are seldom realized in the understanding of ordinary men. To such a mind the great interests of humanity lost not an atom of weight by distance, or by reason of the constitutional difference of language, manners, and opinions, which conceal from vulgar apprehension the common nature of mankind. It was the master passion of Mr Burke to embrace with all the powerful sympathies of his nature, and to conceive with all the grasp of his spacious comprehension, the remotest and most foreign aspects of humanity. The very infirmities of his mind grew out of and confirmed this disposition: the tenacity of purpose early observed the self-accelerating enthusiasm, and the sanguine temper-all had the effect of imparting a deep earnestness of purpose, which when crimes and sufferings which obtained a haunting command of his imagination, became the subject, lent to his manner and language a spirited animosity, which to the vulgar might appear vindictive, and by the misrepresentations of really vindictive calumny, might be speciously so named.

Such is the view which an attentive perusal of the whole history of British India, together with the trial of Mr Hastings, has irresistibly impressed upon us. It is necessary to be brief and summary in the particulars, which shall, however, be sufficiently stated to satisfy any reasonable person as to the justness of our inferences.

The first distinct intimation we find of Mr Burke's intention, occurs in December 1803, in his speech on Mr Fox's East India Bill, of which he is generally supposed to have been himself the author. This bill deserves also some passing notice, not only as illustrative of the points which we have been pressing, but as leading to this illustration in the language of Mr Burke himself.

The general scope and intent of Mr Fox's bill was to vest the affairs of the East India Company in the hands of commissioners appointed by government. The mismanagement of their financial concerns, and still more the abuses of their administration, and the discreditable and iniquitous policy pursued in their transactions with the native princes, afforded grounds for interference, against which the most effective defence on the other side, seems to have been the plea of chartered rights. This point was afterwards urged against Mr Burke as an inconsistency, when he became the strong defender of right and order; it will therefore be not unimportant to hear his own defence: after remarking that there were four main objections to the bill which he enumerates in order, he goes on to explain that two things of different descriptions, are confused under the phrase of chartered rights. Certain covenants by which the rights and liberties of a nation are secured, are to be distinguished from covenants granting special privileges and powers to a small number of persons. These latter, he justly contended, involved

trusts which may be abused to the extent of forfeiture; they may be limited by the rights of the grantor, and cannot be allowed to transgress the great inalienable rights of humanity. "The charters which we call by distinction great, are of this [the first mentioned] nature; I mean the charters of king John and king Henry the Third. The things secured by these instruments may, without any doubtful ambiguity, be very fitly called the chartered rights of men. These charters have made the very name of a charter dear to the heart of every Englishman. But, Sir, there may be, and there are charters, not only different in nature, but formed on principles the very reverse of those of the great charter. Of this kind is the charter of the East India Company. Magna Charta is a charter to restrain power and destroy monopoly. The East India is a charter to establish monopoly and to create power. Political power and commercial monopoly are not the rights of men; and the rights of those derived from charters, it is fallacious and sophistical to call the chartered rights of men.' These chartered rights (to speak of such charters and their effects in terms of the greatest possible moderation) do at least suspend the natural rights of mankind at large; and in their very frame and constitution are liable to fall into a direct violation of them."

*

Having made this distinction, which cannot, we think, be conclu→ sively resisted, he admits the right, under these conditions, to the fullest extent. "But having stated to you of what description the chartered rights are, which this bill touches; I feel no difficulty at all in acknowledging the existence of those chartered rights in their fullest extent. They belong to the company in the surest manner, and they are secured to that body by every sort of publie sanction. They are stamped by the faith of the king-they are stamped by the faith of parliament; they have been bought with money for money honestly and fairly paid; they have been bought for valuable considerations, over and over again. I therefore freely admit to the East India company, their claim to exclude their fellow-subjects, from the commerce of half the globe. I admit their claim to administer an annual territorial revenue of seven millions sterling; to command an army of 60,000 men; and to dispose (under the control of a sovereign imperial discretion, and with the due observance of the natural and local law,) of the lives and fortunes of thirty millions of their fellow-creatures. All this they possess by charter, and by acts of parliament, in my opinion, without a shadow of controversy."

He then dwells strongly on this admitted right, as involving a trust, and as such rendering them accountable; and infers that they must be accountable to parliament, which is itself responsible as the author of the trust. He then affirms that when a trust is betrayed, the contract is broken, and that the grantor has a right of resumption. He next describes the proposed bill as a great charter" for the liberties of

Hindostan.

Mr Burke has been sometimes mentioned as a refiner and a metaphysician, and charged with the faults of unpractical speculation. And yet among the great reformers of past or present generations, he is to be distinguished for the rejection of speculative reforms. In the speech now under our notice, he expresses his own view of this subject