the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the South. 4. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the Poles. We know that while some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game, along the coast of Brazil. 5. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone, of manhood. 6. When I contemplate these things,-when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of a watchful and suspicious government, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection,-when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt, and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty. BURKE 41. PANDEMONIUM. INCE I had the honor, I should say, the dishonor, of sitting SINCE in this house, I have been witness to many strange, many infamous transactions. What can be your intention in attack ing all honor and virtue. Do you mean to bring all men to a level with yourselves, and to extirpate all honor and independence! Perhaps you imagine a vote will settle the whole controversy. 2. Alas! you are not aware that the manner in which your vote is procured is a secret to no man. Listen: for if you are not totally callous, if your consciences are not seared, I will speak daggers to your souls, and wake you to all the hell of guilty recollection. I will follow you with whips and stings, through every maze of your unexampled turpitude, and plant thorns under the rose of ministerial approbation. 3. You have flagrantly violated justice and the law of the land, and opened a door for anarchy and confusion. After assuming an arbitrary dominion over law and justice, you issue orders, warrants, and proclamations, against every opponent, and send prisoners to your Bastile all those who have the courage and virtue to defend the freedom of their country. 4. But it is in vain that you tinguish the native British fire. martyrs you make, the more will become. They will multiply like the hydra, and hurl vengeance on your heads. Let others act as they will; while I have a tongue, or an arm, they shall be free. hope by fear and terror to exThe more sacrifices, the more numerous the sons of liberty 5. And that I may not be a witness of these monstrous proceedings, I will leave the house; nor do I doubt but every independent, every honest man, every friend to England, will follow me. These walls are unholy, baleful, deadly, while a prostitute majority holds the bolt of parliamentary power, and hurls its vengeance only upon the virtuous. To your selves, therefore, I consign you. Enjoy your pandemonium! BURKE. 42. IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS. [This speech has been characterized as the greatest intellectual effort ever made before the Parliament of Great Britain. Burke astonished even those who were most intimately acquainted with him by the vast extent of his reading, the variety of his resources, the minuteness of his information, and the lucid order in which he arranged the whole for the support of his subject. All India was present to the eye of his mind, from the halls where suitors laid gold and perfume at the feet of sovereigns, to the wild moor where the Arab camps were pitched; from the bazaars humming like beehives 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. When Burke described the cruelties inflicted upon the natives, a convulsive shudder ran throughout the whole assembly. His descriptions were more vivid, more harrowing, more horrific than human utterance on either fact or fancy, perhaps, ever formed before. The bosoms of his auditors became convulsed with passion, and those of more delicate organs swooned away. Mr. Hastings, in describing the scene afterwards, said, “For half an hour I looked up at the orator in a revery of wonder, and actually felt myself to be the most culpable man on earth."] MY Y Lords, I do not mean now to go further than just to remind your lordships of this-that Mr. Hastings' government was one whole system of oppression, of robbery of individuals, of spoliation of the public, and of suppression of the whole system of the English Government, in order to vest in the worst of the natives all the power that could possibly exist in any government; in order to defeat the ends which all governments ought, in common, to have in view. In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villainy upon Warren Hastings, in this last moment of my application to you. 2. My lords, what is it that we want here, to a great act of national justice? Do we want a cause, my lords? You have the cause of oppressed princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and of wasted kingdoms. 3. Do you want a criminal, my lords? When was there so much iniquity ever laid to the charge of any one?—No, my lords, you must not look to punish any other such delinquent from India. Warren Hastings has not left substance enough in India to nourish such another delinquent. 4. My lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have before you the Commons of Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe, my lords, that the sun, in his beneficent progress round the world, does not behold a more glorious sight than that of men, separated from a remote people by the material bounds and barriers of nature, united by the bond of a social and moral community ;-all the Commons of England resenting, as their own, the indignities and cruelties that are offered to all the people of India. 5. Do we want a tribunal? My lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us with a tribunal like this. We commit safely the interests of India and humanity into your hands. Therefore, it is with confidence that, ordered by the Commons, 6. I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors. 7. I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, in Parliament assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has betrayed. 8. I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonored. 9. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties, he has subverted; whose properties he has destroyed; whose country he has laid waste and desolate. 10. I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated. 11. I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life. BURKE 43. PERORATION TO THE IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS. [This speech lasted four days. It was in the darkest season of the French Revolution-a few days before the fall of Robespierre, when the British empire was agitated with conflicting passions, and fears were entertained by many of secret conspiracies to overthrow the government. To these thing Burke referred at the close of his peroration, which has a grandeur and solemnity becoming the conclusion of such a trial.] MY Y Lords, I have done! The part of the Commons is concluded! With a trembling hand, we consign the product of these long, long labors to your charge. Take it! TAKE IT! It is a sacred trust! Never before was a cause of such magnitude submitted to any human tribunal! 2. My lords, at this awful close, in the name of the Commons, and surrounded by them, I attest the retiring, I attest the advancing generations, between which, as a link in the chain of eternal order, we stand. 3. We call this nation, we call the world, to witness, that the Commons have shrunk from no labor; that we have been guilty of no prevarications; that we have made no compromise with crime; that we have not feared any odium whatsoever, in the long warfare which we have carried on with the crimes, the vices, the exorbitant wealth, the enormous and overpowering influence of Eastern corruption. 4. A business which has so long occupied the councils and tribunals of Great Britain, cannot possibly be hurried over in the course of vulgar, trite, and transitory events. Nothing but some of those great revolutions that break the traditionary chain of human memory, and alter the very face of nature itself, can possibly obscure it. My lords, we are all elevated to a degree of importance by it. The meanest of us will, by means of it, become more or less the concern of posterity. 5. My lords, your house yet stands; it stands, a great edifice; but, let me say, it stands in the midst of ruins-in the midst of ruins that have been made by the greatest moral earthquake that ever convulsed and shattered this globe of ours. My lords, it has pleased Providence to place us in such a state, that we appear every moment to be on the verge of some great mutation. 6. There is one thing, and one thing only, that defies mutation that which existed before the world itself. I mean JUSTICE: that justice which, emanating from the Divinity, has a place in the breast of every one of us, given us for our guide with regard to ourselves, and with regard to others; and |