120: 9.-To forsake principles. Compare his Speech at the Conclusion of the Poll (1774) and Speech in the Guildhall at Bristol (1780).

121: 7.- The Saviles, etc. Sir George Savile has been referred to in connection with the Letter to the Marquis of Rockingham. Dowdeswell was the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first Rockingham administration. Wentworth was the family name of the Marquis of Rockingham, Bentinck the family name of the Dukes of Portland, and Lenox that of the Dukes of Richmond. All of these, with the Duke of Manchester, were prominent opponents of Lord North's American policy. The Cavendishes were a great Whig family. Admirals Keppel and Saunders had distinguished themselves in the Seven Years' War, and had both been Lords of the Admiralty under the elder Pitt. See Burke's tribute to Keppel at the close of his Letter to a Noble Lord.

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122: 25.- Titius and Mævius. "One man and another; terms used like John Doe" and "Richard Roe" to distinguish imaginary parties in a lawsuit.

SPEECHES ON INDIA.

Burke's interest in the affairs of India began at least as early as 1773, when he is known to have distrusted Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General appointed under Lord North's Regulating Act. The "Ninth Report" of the committee appointed by the House of Commons to investigate the actions of the East India Company is one of the finest of his state papers (1783), and his speech in December of that year in support of Fox's India Bill— which was largely of Burke's own drafting—falls but little below the level of his greatest parliamentary efforts. He spoke again the following year upon Pitt's India Bill, and on February 28, 1785, the year of Hastings's return to England, he delivered the famous Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts. In 1786, aided by Sir Philip Francis, he drew up the articles of charge against Hastings. The opening of the trial, which Macaulay's description has made a scene familiar to the imagination, took place on February 13, 1788. It was not concluded until June 16, 1794, the days of actual session, in that interval, being 118. The Lords brought in their verdict of acquittal in 1795.

Burke bore the brunt of the prosecution. "If I were to call for a reward," he declared in his Letter to a Noble Lord (1795), "it would be for the services in which for fourteen years, without intermission, I showed the most industry and had the least success. I mean the affairs of India; they are those on which I value myself the most; most for the importance; most for the labor; most for the judgment; most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit." The motive that sustained him through the long struggle is not difficult to discover. It is true that India appealed to his imagination. In a well-known passage from the essay on Warren Hastings, Macaulay notes: "All India was present to the eye of his [Burke's] mind, from the halls where suitors laid gold and perfumes at the feet of sovereigns to the wild moors where the gypsy camp was pitched, from the bazar, humming like a bee-hive with the crowd of buyers and sellers, to the jungle where the lonely courier shakes his bunch of iron rings to scare away the hyenas. He had just as lively an idea of the insurrection at Benares as of Lord George Gordon's riots, and of the execution of Nuncomar as of the execution of Dr. Dodd. Oppression in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppression in the streets of London." His imaginative sensibility brought vividly before him the wrongs of the natives, but it was his passion for justice that kept him faithful to their cause. While the acquittal of Hastings was in one sense a defeat for Burke, it is the universal testimony of those best fitted to judge that "if he did not convict the man, he overthrew a system, and stamped its principles with lasting censure and shame." In reality Burke gained his end, and shaped the whole subsequent Indian policy of Great Britain. (See Macaulay's essay on Warren Hastings, Morley's Edmund Burke: A Historical Study, and Morley's Burke, chap. vii.)

THE RAVAGE OF THE CARNATIC.

"A space less than one of these pages contains such a picture of the devastation of the Carnatic by Hyder Ali as may fill the young orator or the young writer with the same emotions of enthusiasm, emulation, and despair that torment the artist who first

gazes on the Madonna at Dresden, or the figures of Night and Dawn and the Penseroso at Florence."-Morley's Burke, p. 126.

These famous paragraphs from the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts may be understood almost without reference to this context, The Nabob, or native prince, of Arcot was in the power of the East India Company, to whom he owed enormous sums, the interest upon which was extorted by the company from the natives of the Carnatic. In pursuance of the Nabob's ambitious schemes for the conquest of Hindostan, the Company's troops were withdrawn from the Carnatic, leaving it open to the invasion of Hyder Ali.

128: 1.—Magnificent plan. For conquering Hindostan. The East India Company used the Nabob of Arcot as a stalking-horse for its own schemes.

128: 5.—Hyder Ali. Maharaja of Mysore, a soldier of obscure birth, but of great abilities. The invasion of the Carnatic took place in 1780. Hyder Ali was defeated by Sir Eyre Coote in a series of battles in 1781, and died the following year.

128: 7.-Carnatic. A name formerly given to a country on the eastern coast of British India. It is now included in the governorship of Madras.

129: 4.-Double, or rather treble.

Burke is probably alluding to the Court of Directors and the Presidency of Madras, both of which were subject to the ministerial Board of Control.

131: 2.-Tanjore. The capital city of the district of Tanjore, in Madras.

131: 21.-More ferocious son. Tippoo Sahib, who succeeded Hyder Ali in 1782, and fought the British with varying success.

IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS.

THE CHARGE.

133: 3.-Provincial councils. See Articles of Charge, Burke's Works, iv. 420.

133: 12.-Dewan.

Here used in the sense of financial agent.

133: 21.-Gunga Govin Sing. See the proceedings of the fifth and sixth days of the trial.

134: 12.-Debi Sing. See the proceedings of the fifth day, on the testimony of Paterson.

THE PERORATION.

140: 8.-Blood. It will be remembered that Burke was now speaking when the Reign of Terror was at its height, just previous to the fall of Robespierre.

140: 25.-Parliament of Paris. The principal tribunal of justice of the French monarchy, down to the time of the Revolution.

140: 32.—Mirabeau. The Count of Mirabeau (1749–91), the great orator and practical statesman of the Revolution. (See H. Morse Stephens's French Revolution, vol. i.)

REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.

From the time of his visit to France in 1773-74, Burke viewed the philosophical and social unrest across the Channel with increasing distrust. The summoning of the States-General seemed to him a matter for alarm. When the Bastile fell (July 14, 1789), and his friend Fox exulted, in common with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and many of the finest spirits among young Englishmen, Burke saw only the oncoming of an evil hour. In October, when the king and queen were conducted by the mob from Versailles to Paris, every instinct of conservatism in him told him that the worst was at hand.

On November 4, the anniversary of the landing of the Prince of Orange in the Revolution of 1688, the members of the so-called Revolution Society, including some peers and members of the House, met to listen to the annual sermon in commemoration of the day. The preacher, Dr. Price, expressed the greatest admiration for the conduct of the French Revolutionists, endeavoring to show that they were acting in accordance with the principles of the English Revolution of 1688. Burke's anger was roused, and he began a reply. In form it was a letter to a young Frenchman, who had asked his opinion upon what was happening in France. The letter grew to a pamphlet, and for a whole year

It saw

was revised, corrected, and rewritten with incessant care. the light in November, 1790, and in less than twelve months it ran through eleven editions, no less than thirty thousand copies being sold in the first six years.

The labor Burke devoted to the Reflections reveals his motive for the task. In the House of Commons, partly because of his factious conduct after the sudden death of the Marquis of Rockingham in 1782, he found himself out of touch with both parties, and was no longer listened to with patience. In the pamphlet he addressed the nation, and soon learned that it was upon his side. From month to month his reputation as a political prophet increased, until he became, on the strength of the Reflections, one of the best known men in Europe.

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His intention," said Thomas Paine in the Rights of Man, the most famous of all the replies which the Reflections called forth, "was to make an attack on the French Revolution; but instead of proceeding by an orderly arrangement, he has stormed it with a mob of ideas tumbling over and destroying each other." This is hardly just, and yet the texture of the Reflections is undoubtedly uneven. The elaborate refutation of false ideas concerning the English Revolution of 1688, with which it opens, is quite as untenable as the views he is controverting. His blunders in dealing with many matters of fact were promptly pointed out by Paine, and by James Mackintosh in the Vindicia Gallica. But the most serious defect of his essay¦is his failure to comprehend the social and economic causes of the Revolution. The sympathetic imagination which had enabled him to put himself in the place of the American colonists, or of the oppressed millions in India, seemed now to go out toward an insulted Court rather than toward a long-suffering nation. What the young Wordsworth rightly recognized as

a terrific reservoir of guilt And ignorance filled up from age to age,"

was to Burke only a long succession of orderly events, which it would be a pity to disturb.

In spite of all this, the essay deserves its fame. We read it not so much to get light upon the French Revolution, as to bẹ