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declared Parliament was not a congress of amadors from hostile states with different interests, but a deliberative assembly with one interest, that of the whole; that they chose a member, but when he had been chosen, he was n.t a member of Bristol, but a member of ParJament; and he utterly repudiated the idea of being bound by mandates or authoritative instructions from his constituents. Mr. Kruger, tia fellow-candidate, was totally overwhelmed and dumbfounded by the brilliancy of Mr. Burke's oratory, and after an unusually exhaustive and eloquent speech of his colleague, was content to cry emphatically, as his contribution to the oratory of the day, "I say ditto to Mr. Barke! I say ditto to Mr. Burke !"

The inipendence of judgment for which he pated on the hustings, Burke exercised in as place in Parliament. He eloquently spoke A favour of the abolition of some restrictive aws that harassed the trade of Ireland; though Bristol constituents, from a not unnatural yal asy, petitioned against measures of free trade for Ireland. Burke knew he was risking his seat by opposing himself to the wishes of the electors, but was content to do what he

dered right and just, without regard to coquences. He paid the penalty at the next general election, in 1780, when he found himself

red with having, on various matters of py, voted against the opinion of the good eple of Bristol. He defended himself with vigour and dignity, declaring that he found his

lation in the fact that he was not accused f verality, or of neglect of duty, or of sacrifg his constituents' interests to his own

, but simply that he had pushed the ples of general justice and benevolence far. Seeing that, though he still had many trends among the most respectable of the ple, the million were against him, he deLed to ontest the borough, and took his leave Bristol, as he expressed it, "in sorrow and not in anger," returning to Malton, for which trengh be continued to sit to the end of his paramentary career.

One of the points upon which the independence and courage of Burke had given umbrage to the worthy Bristol electors had to do with a

question. The severe penal laws against he Cathours, passed at a time of national excitement and danger, were felt to be quite dessly harsh and oppressive, now that the ersity for their maintenance had long ceased to crist; and Sir George Savile brought in a bill for the relief of the Roman Catholics, a measure

to which Burke gave his heartiest support; refusing, moreover, a present of five hundred guineas, offered to him as a reward for his exertions by a body of delighted Roman Catholics, on the passing of the Bill, and discouraging also the idea of the erection of a statue to him in Dublin, on the sensible ground that such honours are suitable only as memorials of the dead. In June, 1800, through the mischievous meddling of a crazy fanatic, Lord George Gordon, an enormous crowd of the lowest rabble from the London slums united into a kind of mock confederacy, dignified by the name of the Protestant Association, assembled on Kennington Common, and thence marched to the door of the House of Parliament, to present a petition for the repeal of Savile's Act. Repulsed from the House of Commons, chiefly through the determined conduct of General Conway, they separated into mobs, ripe for mischief, and began burning down Catholic chapels, and attacking and plundering the houses of those gentlemen who had been instrumental in passing Savile's bill. Burke, as a prominent advocate for Catholic relief, had become obnoxious to some of the fanatics, and was again caricatured in his old character of Neddy St. Omers, and the Jesuit stirring up the fires of Smithfield. Nevertheless, he went boldly out among the crowd, and afterwards reported, with great truth, that many of them had no definite idea of a religious question, but were simply riotous and unruly. The supineness of the authorities, however, delivered London into the hands of these rioters for some days. Burke, who had energetically advocated the prompt: putting down of these disgraceful disturbances, pleaded for mercy for the many deluded prisoners who were sentenced to death after order was restored; pointing out, with great truth, that the execution of a few ringleaders would strike more terror than the indiscriminate hanging of a number of subordinate agents.

At length, in 1782, the ministry of Lord North, utterly discredited by the state of things in America, by the necessity of increased taxation, and by the general opinion of its inefficiency, resigned office, and the Rockingham party returned to power once more. Burke was made a privy councillor, and obtained the office of Paymaster of the Forces. This office was one to which various irregular gains were attached, such as the interest accruing from the sum, seldom less than £1,000,000, in the paymaster's hands, with various other advantages. With singular disinterestedness, Burke introduced a thorough reform of the department, and sur

rendered all these perquisites, refusing to receive anything beyond the salary for his office. He thus saved the nation an outlay of £18,000, his own salary being, according to his bill for reforming the finances, cut down to £4,000.

The tenure of power by the new Ministry was brief. Lord Rockingham died, after a very short illness, and Lord Shelburne, a man especially obnoxious to Fox, Burke, and the rest of the Rockingham party, was appointed to succeed him; whereupon Burke and his colleagues resigned their offices. Lord Shelburne, after vainly endeavouring, by means of young Mr. Pitt, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, to effect a reconciliation with Fox, was obliged to go out in his turn, and the Rockingham party resumed their seats, Burke taking up his office of paymaster, while Richard, his brother, became first one of the Treasury secretaries, and afterwards Recorder of Bristol. Lord Portland was placed at the head of the administration, in which Lord North, who still had a numerous following in Parliament, was likewise included; and hence it obtained the title of the Coalition Ministry.

They were not in office long. The misgovernment of India had long become a scandal throughout the world, and Fox brought in his India bill, with the intention of taking all government authority out of the hands of the East India Company; and this was to be done, moreover, in a very high-handed manner. The king became alarmed, and used his influence with such success, that the bill was thrown out in the House of Peers; and the king thereupon dismissed the ministry, chiefly, it is said, out of hatred to Fox, whom he detested with persevering rancour. William Pitt then entered upon his long lease of power, shielded from opposition by the support of George III., and Burke's short tenure of power closed for ever.

LATER YEARS. TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS.

The time now came when the hardest task of a laborious political life was to be undertaken by the defender of the liberties and rights of America. Burke was now to stand up in the cause of oppressed millions, against a tyranny in comparison to which the worst injustice inflicted upon the American colonies was mercy and benevolence-to denounce the great successful bad proconsul, who had increased the wealth of a mercantile company, while he brought shame upon the name of England in far-off Hindostan. There was much in the splendour and romance that surrounded India, with its ancient civilization and literature, its picturesque architecture,

wonderful tropical vegetation, and above all the various castes of its myriad population, to make that country interesting to a man of Burke's powerful mind. He had studied India and its affairs till he could describe all connected with it with an accuracy a man who had long dwelt there might envy. "All India was present to the eye of his mind, from the halls where suitors laid gold and perfumes at the feet of sovereigns, to the wild moor where the gipsy camp was pitched; from the bazaar, humming like a beehive with the crowd of buyers and sellers, to the jungle, where the lonely courier shakes his bunch of iron rings to scare away the hyænas." For years there had come across the ocean, from this great dependency of the British Empire, dark rumours, gradually spreading into outspoken reports, that made the heart of Burke to sicken within him, and his blood to boil at the heights and depths they disclosed of tyranny and wrong. A tyrant, without pity, remorse, or fear, sat enthroned, by the act of the British senate, as Govenor-General of India; and the enormous power put by the legislature into his hands had been grossly abused. Aided by unscrupulous instruments, among whom an unjust judge stood forward with infamous prominence, he had plundered the natives, and ill-used and robbed princes and princesses. He had lent English troops to a native ruler for the purpose of enslaving a brave nation who had done no wrong to the English, and had doomed a chivalric race to slavery and subjection under merciless foes, in return for blood-money, paid down as the price of his intervention. During the latter years of the first governor-general's rule in India, as the demands of the Company for more money increased in urgency, the means taken to gratify that lust for wealth, from being unscrupulous, became utterly wicked and horri. ble. Organized extortion and fraud, upheld by tyranny that called to its aid the infliction of outrages, insult, and tortures; a total denial of the rights of the natives as subjects of the English Government, to the ordinary safeguards of law and justice; oppression at last consolidated into a system against which there was no appeal; such were the realities, partly hidden under the glare of military success and aggrandisement, in the government of India under Warren Hastings. At one time, even in India, there had been a strong opposition to his proceedings. One man especially had shown suflicient courage to head a faction against him at his own council board, and had written in the minute book of the council a memorandum so hostile to the governor-general that he had been compelled to give "satisfac

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b," in the form of a hostile meeting, to the person denounced, and had been dangerously weanded; but even the bitter hostility and persistent opposition of Sir Philip Francis had bern powerless against a man so utterly unscru pas as Hastings. Once the clamour against hm in England had become so formidable that it seemed as if even the Company, who, profiting by his extortions, upheld him, would be unable to stem the torrent of popular indignation. Hastings had sent home his resignation by the hands of his agent, who had duly presented it: when matters took a turn in his favour, he had resaliated his own act and his own handwriting, and the disputed authority of his friend; and ! entered upon a new lease of power and oppression. And now, when this man, having rained brilliant successes, and enlarged the emre of Britain, or rather of the Company, in the East, returned to England, the majority re ready to balance the profit against crimes, and to bury all the bad deeds of Warren Hastings in oblivion, because he had en successful in increasing the territory verned by the British in India, and because revenue of the Company was augmented. The proprietors of India stock were ready to hid his cause. The king condescended to

ve him with great favour, and the queen to acrept presents from him. It was said he was en to be raised to the peerage, by the title of Paron Hastings, of Daylesford, from the seat of bas ancestors in Worcestershire. But Burke had

mined that these evil things should not go dan unchallenged into oblivion. Hastings had bardy landed in England before he gave public tace in Parliament of an intention to inquire to the late governor-general's conduct: and aber various delays it was determined, chiefly trgh his exertions, that Hastings should be brought to trial for his crimes, before the peers of Erzand, sitting in Westminster Hall. Burke Lif, and his friends Charles Fox, Sheridan, Wyudham, and Grey, were appointed managers toonduct the prosecution. Among many accu

the chief charges were, that Hastings Bent English troops for the destruction of the Ba, in consideration of forty lacs of rupees (140) paid by the Nabob of Oude; that he

been guilty of inflicting hardships, spoLata, and imprisonment on the begums or

ses of Oude; that he had unjustly ruined and dyed Cheyte Singh, rajah of Benares.

Th the proceedings

were commenced in

175, it was not until the 13th of February, 1788, Lat the trial commenced in Westminster Hall.

The great interest the nation took in the proceedings was manifested by the presence, on the opening day, of a crowd of spectators, of both sexes and all ranks, from the royal princesses downwards. Mr. Edmund Burke opened the impeachment by one of the grandest speeches he had ever delivered. The concluding words of this magnificent oration were pronounced with a grandeur and energy that impressed every hearer with admiration. "Therefore," cried Burke, after a masterly and splendid exposition of the case, "therefore hath it with all confidence been ordered by the Commons of Great Britain, that I impeach Warren Hastings of high crimes and misdemeanours. I impeach him in the name of the Commons House of Parliament, whose trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of the English nation, whose honour he has sullied. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose rights he has trodden under foot, and whose country he has turned into a desert. Lastly, in the name of human nature itself, in the name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in the name of every rank, I impeach the common enemy and oppressor of all."

The effect produced by the speech, in which Burke described the cruelties perpetrated in India, was tremendous. All present were filled with pity for the oppressed nation, and with hatred for the oppressor. The female portion of the auditory wept and sobbed abundantly; and even Warren Hastings himself declared that for half an hour he felt himself the most culpable of men. Sheridan, in his magnificent, though somewhat theatrical, speech on the case of the begums of Oude, intensified the feeling; and had the trial been at once continued day by day to its conclusion, there is little doubt that a conviction would have followed. But it was not so. From various reasons, such as the necessary absence of the judges on circuit, the pressure of public business, and the tactics pursued by the counsel for the defence, who threw every obstacle in the way of the prosecution, with the hope of tiring the managers out, the affair lingered on from session to session. Frequently points of law were raised, which the law lords had to discuss in their own. chamber. "The judges walked, and the trial stood still," said a witty critic. Hastings had enabled many to make their fortunes in India, and had thus many friends in Parliament and out of it, who stood up for him, declared his misdeeds had been exaggerated, and strove to harass the managers by imputations of personal and political rancour. No less a sum than £20,000 was spent by Hastings in influencing the

press. Even the caricaturists were employed to use the potent weapon, ridicule, in the cause of Hastings. The managers were represented as "political banditti, assaulting the saviour of India;" in a coarsely humorous print, "The First Charge," Burke is depicted calling upon the court to find Hastings guilty of not suffering an Indian prince to smoke for two days; in another, he is shown exhibiting a magic lantern microscope that magnifies a 'begum wart' into a mountain, and a Benares flea into an elephant; while begum's tears also attain enormous proportions. But amid the indifference of a large portion of the public, and the active hostility of others, Burke toiled on. He had put his hand to the plough, and he would not look back. During these years of what promised to be fruitless work, his temper sometimes gave way under the violent strain; and the irritability he occasionally displayed was skilfully turned to account by his opponents. Some unguarded and unparliamentary words uttered by him were made the occasion of a vote of censure. It was expected that under such an insult he would retire from the prosecution; but he bowed his noble head, now bent with age and toil, to the rebuke, and persisted in his duty. A dissolution of Parliament took place, and the friends of Hastings declared that the whole proceedings should end with the House of Commons that had ordered the impeachment. But still Burke persevered, and the trial was not dropped. In his conscience he believed Hastings a guilty man. He had undertaken to prove the misdeeds of the governorgeneral; and a task he had once begun, nothing could induce him to abandon. Charles Fox, his brilliant coadjutor, did him justice in this matter. "The affairs of India," said Fox, "had long been hid in a darkness as hostile to inquiry as it was friendly to guilt, but by the exertions of one man these clouds had been dissipated. His ardent virtue, his sublime genius, and that glowing enthusiasm so essential to both, had, with the application of years, left them nothing of information at present to desire."

In June, 1794, when the managers summed up on the different charges, Mr. Burke being the last to speak, his duty in connection with the trial ended. In the next year, in April, a verdict of acquittal, which had been long expected, was given; then Mr. Pitt proposed, and Mr. Dundas seconded, a vote of thanks to the managers on the conclusion of their long and arduous duties, and the motion was carried. And with this the political life of Burke ended; for he immediately afterwards retired from Parliament.

The long and harassing work which the great orator had carried to an end in the face of so much opposition and obloquy, produced great and lasting effects. Hastings indeed was acquit. ted; but the grand principle of responsibility for which Burke contended was definitely established. It was now fully understood that the arm of the law could stretch across the many thousands of miles separating Great Britain from India; that the "black water," as the natives termed the dreaded ocean, was no obstacle to the passage of British justice. The worst proceedings of Hastings would have been impossible, had not former governors in India been allowed an im. punity that made them look upon themselves as unaccountable and despotic. It was Burke who sternly upheld the proposition that despotic power was unknown to the English constitution; that even the king could not bestow it upon any individual, for it was not his to give. Hastings himself, though acquitted, did not escape unpunished. The trial had been fatal to his hopes of having an advancement in government employ in England. While the proceedings against him were in progress, it was impossible to employ him; when they were concluded, he was too old to begin a fresh career. The East India Company came to his assistance by pay ing the expenses of the trial, £70,000, and by bestowing upon him a pension, upon which he lived in retirement at Daylesford, till, in 1818, he terminated his chequered career at the age of eighty-three years.

BURKE AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

During the decade occupied by these Indian proceedings, great and eventful changes took place for Burke, bringing with them estrangement from old friends, and alienation from the political party with whom for a number of years he had been cordially and closely allied. Next to the affairs of India, Burke's attention during the closing portion of his career was absorbed, and his fortunes were influenced, by matters connected with the French Revolution.

For years he had watched with anxious interest the tokens that heralded the coming storm in France. During a visit to that country, shortly before the accession of Louis XVI., he had seen the causes at work that brought about the mighty crash of an ancient throne, and the overthrow of the ancient landmarks of govern. ment throughout Europe. Already, in 1789, before the horrible phase of the Revolution, the Reign of Terror, had commenced. Burke had made up his mind concerning the whole move

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ment, which he unhesitatingly condemned. To
him the fact that the soldiers were no longer to be
depended on by the government, served to stamp
the whole movement with the very worst features
of sedition and rebellion. He did not see that the
refusal to obey blindly the orders of an irrespon-
sible despotism was in itself no unhopeful sign.
Intense sympathy with the victims of the excesses
which soon began to deface the great popular
movement, blinded him to the tremendous wrongs
the people had suffered for centuries. His mind,

by a long public career, which had been
almost from the beginning a hard conflict, had
langer the clearness of former days. He is
prejudiced and violent whenever he has to deal
with the subject of the Revolution, the mention
of which acts upon him as the sight of scarlet

a ball. He wrote a work, "Reflections on
the French Revolution," in which he set forth
at length his ideas and prophecies. It had
enormous success, was translated into French,
and became the text-book of royalists and
empires" But even Horace Walpole, who
professed himself delighted with it, owned that
same respects the author had gone too far;
"Yet in general," he kindly adds, "there is far
want of judgment than could be expected
from him;" the him referring, of course, to
Burke. The sale of thirty thousand copies of
the work attested its popularity.

A passage in this work, very often quoted in
prad of the powers of Burke, shows that in
this case those powers were rather of imagina-
tion than judgment. "It is now sixteen years,”
be writes, "since I saw the Queen of France,
then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely
serer lighted on this orb, which she hardly
ed to touch, a more delightful vision. I
aw her just above the horizon, decorating and
cheering the elevated sphere she was just begin-
ng to move in-glittering like the morning star,
of life and splendour and joy. Oh what
a sevulation! and what a heart must I have to
template, without emotion, that elevation
and that fall!... I thought ten thousand
rds must have leaped from their scabbards
to avenge even a look that threatened her with

But the age of chivalry is gone....
The unbought 'grace of life, the cheap defence
of nations, the nurse of manly sentiments and
eric enterprise, is gone. It is gone, that sensi-
bility of principle, that chastity of honour, which
falta stain like a wound, which inspired courage
while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled what-
ever it touched, and under which vice itself lost
half its evil, by losing all its grossness." Now this

was soaring into what a matter-of-fact judge once called "the high sentimental latitudes" most absurdly. To talk of the chastity of honour in reference to the higher classes in France during the last century, from the time of the Regent Orleans and his roués to the unutterable infamies of the rule of Louis XV., sounds like bitter irony. The assertion that vice loses half its evil by losing all its grossness, is also open to very grave doubt, inasmuch as the grossness of vice, displaying itself in all its hideousness, will deter many by inspiring disgust; and vice that has lost its grossness is the most insidious and dangerous of all. The present generation, too, can to the full pity and deplore the sorrows of the illfated Marie Antoinette, without being struck with admiration of the utterly frivolous French Court, with its Trianon and mock pastoral fêtes, its fiddling and dancing and coxcombry, in the midst of a nation mad with oppression, and hunger, and despair. George III. certainly perused the Reflections with a great deal of pleasure, remarking that it was a book that every gentleman ought to read; but as that royal critic declared a great part of Shakespeare to be "sad stuff," perhaps his judgment would hardly be received as possessing much weight. Miss Burney, Walpole, and Cumberland, the "genteel" dramatist, raised their voices in favour of the work; but though the enthusiastic lady especially declared it to be "the noblest, deepest, and most animated and exalted work she had ever

read," posterity has not endorsed the opinion.

The heat and fury with which Burke inveighed

against the Revolution and everything thereunto appertaining, startled and irritated his friends of the Whig party, Fox, Sheridan, and the rest, while it gave his enemies new weapons wherewith to goad the old lion to madness. At last, on one memorable evening in the House of Commons, after a bitter speech from Fox, who appears to have considerably lost his temper, Burke solemnly declared that the new Government of France, which Mr. Fox had been praising, was a plundering, ferocious, bloody, tyrannical democracy; and that though at his age it was obviously indiscreet to provoke enemies or to risk the loss of friends, he would put everything to the hazard for his public duty, and with his last breath exclaim, "Flee from the French Constitution!" Fox, unwilling that matters should go to extremity, whispered, "There is no loss of friendship." Burke angrily replied, "Yes, there is! I know the price of my conduct. I have indeed made a great sacrifice. I have done my duty, though I have lost my friend." And though Fox

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