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IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS.

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melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation; and then, without one natural pang, sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers. Vanity, however, finds its account in reversing the train of our natural feelings. Thousands admire the sentimental writer; the affectionate father is hardly known in his parish.

3. IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS.

My lords, you have now heard the principles on which Mr Hastings governs the part of Asia subjected to the British empire. You have heard his opinion of the mean and depraved state of those who are subject to it. You have heard his lecture upon arbitrary power, which he states to be the constitution of Asia. You hear the application he makes of it; and you hear the practices which he employs to justify it, and who the persons were on whose authority he relies, and whose example he professes to follow. In the first place, your lordships will be astonished at the audacity with which he speaks of his own administration, as if he was reading a speculative lecture on the evils attendant upon some vicious system of foreign government, in which he had no sort of concern whatsoever. And then, when in this speculative way he has established, or thinks he has, the vices of the government, he conceives he has found a sufficient apology for his own crimes. And if he violates the most solemn engagements, if he oppresses, extorts, and robs, if he imprisons, confiscates, banishes, at his sole will and pleasure, when we accuse him for his ill treatment of the people committed to him as a sacred trust, his defence is,-" to be robbed, violated, oppressed, is their privilege-let the constitution of their country answer for it. I did not make it for them. Slaves I found them, and as slaves I have treated them. I was a despotic prince, despotic governments are jealous, and the subjects prone to rebellion. This very proneness of the subject to shake off his allegiance exposes him to continual danger from his sovereign's jealousy, and this is consequent on the political state of Hindostanic governments." He lays it down as a rule, that despotism is the genuine constitution of India; that a disposition to rebellion in the subject, or dependent prince, is the necessary effect of this despotism, and that jealousy and its consequences naturally arise on the part of the sovereign; that the government is everything, and the subject nothing; that the great landed men are in a mean and depraved state, and subject to many evils.

But nothing is more false than that despotism is the constitution of any country in Asia, that we are acquainted with. It is certainly not true of any Mahomedan constitution. But if it were, do your lordships really think, that the nation would bear, that any human creature would bear, to hear an English governor defend himself on such principles? or, if he can defend himself on such principles, is

it possible to deny the conclusion, that no man in India has a security for anything but by being totally independent of the British government? Here he has declared his opinion, that he is a despotic prince, that he is to use arbitrary power, and of course all his acts are covered with that shield. "I know," says he, "the constitution of Asia only from its practice." Will your lordships submit to hear the corrupt practices of mankind made the principles of government? No; it will be your pride and glory to teach men intrusted with power, that, in their use of it, they are to conform to principles, and not to draw their principles from the corrupt practice of any man whatever. Was there ever heard, or could it be conceived, that a governor would dare to heap up all the evil practices, all the cruelties, oppressions, extortions, corruptions, briberies, of all the ferocious usurpers, desperate robbers, thieves, cheats, and jugglers, that ever had office from one end of Asia to another, and consolidating all this mass of the crimes and absurdities of barbarous domination into one code, establish it as the "whole duty” of an English governor? I believe that till this time so audacious a thing was never attempted by man.

He have arbitrary power! My lords, the East Indian Company have not arbitrary power to give him; the king has no arbitrary power to give him; your lordships have not; nor the Commons; nor the whole legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give; because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give. No man can lawfully govern himself according to his own will, much less can one person be governed by the will of another. We are all born in subjection, all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, pre-existent law, prior to all our devices, and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas and all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir.

4. ON CONCILIATION WITH THE AMERICAN COLONIES.

My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are the ties which, though light as air, are strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government, they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another; that these two things may exist without any mutual relation, the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the

ON CONCILIATION WITH THE AMERICAN COLONIES.

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chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia; but until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you. This is the commodity of price of which you have the monopoly: this the true act of navigation which binds you to the commerce of the colonies, and through them secures to you the commerce of the world. Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally made, and must still preserve, the unity of the empire. Do not entertain so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your coquets and your clearances, are what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English constitution which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies, every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member.

Is it not the same virtue which does everything for you here in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the Land-tax Act which raises your revenue? That it is the annual vote in the Committee of Supply which gives you your army?-or that it is the Mutiny Bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No; surely not. It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber. All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be the directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with zeal to fill our places as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate all our public proceedings on America with the old warning of the Church, sursum

corda. We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire, and have made the most extensive and the only honourable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness, of the human race. Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American empire. English privileges have made it all that it is, English privileges alone will make it all that it can be. In full confidence of this unalterable truth, I now lay the first stone of the temple of peace.2

XX. ADAM SMITH.

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ADAM SMITH was born in 1723, at Kirkcaldy, in Fifeshire, and after the usual education which the grammar school of the town could supply, he went to the University of Glasgow, and subsequently to Oxford, where he completed the usual term of study. Not feeling any inclination for the Church, for which he had been destined, he established himself as a Lecturer on Rhetoric in Edinburgh, till, in 1759, he was appointed Professor of Logic in Glasgow University, and the next year was transferred to the Chair of Moral Philosophy. In 1751 he issued his great work on Moral Philosophy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments," which at once attained a high degree of popularity. He subsequently quitted his Professorship, and attended the young Duke of Buccleuch in his travels on the Continent, and on his return retired to Kirkcaldy, and engaged in a long course of study chiefly on political subjects, which issued in the publication of his "Wealth of Nations" in 1776. He was shortly afterwards appointed one of the Commissioners of his Majesty's Customs in Scotland, which secured him for the remainder of his life an income more than sufficient for his moderate desires. He died in 1790. Though the theory of morals which Smith taught has long been abandoned as untenable, it is admitted that he defended it with great ingenuity; and his Theory of Moral Sentiments," in plain, forcible eloquence, is inferior to no work on morals in the language. Of his "Wealth of Nations" it is unnecessary to speak. It is universally acknowledged to have laid the foundation of the modern science of political economy.

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1. EXTENT OF SYMPATHY.

"MORAL SENTIMENTS.")

Sympathy does not arise so much from the view of a passion in another, as from that of the situation which excites it. We some

1 i. e., "lift up your hearts." The words are taken from the Communion Service of the Church of England, where they occur immediately after the Absolution.

2 By this figurative expression Burke meant that he was going to move in the House of Commons that conciliatory measures should be adopted towards the American Colonies. In accordance with the classical figure which he had adopted, he added the customary classical prayer, "felix faustumque sit""-may it prove fortunate, and of good omen.

EXTENT OF SYMPATHY.

363 times feel for another a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality. We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behaviour; because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be overwhelmed, had we behaved in so absurd a manner. Of all the calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes mankind, the loss of reason appears, to those who have the least spark of humanity, by far the most dreadful, and they behold that last stage of human wretchedness with deeper commiseration than any other. But the poor wretch who is in it laughs and sings, perhaps, and is altogether insensible to his own misery. The anguish which humanity feels, therefore, at the sight of such an object, cannot be the reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer. The compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment.

What are the pangs of a mother when she hears the moanings of her infant, that, during the agony of disease, cannot express what it feels? In her idea of what it suffers, she joins to its real helplessness her own consciousness of that helplessness, and her own terrors for the unknown consequences of its disorder; and out of all these, forms for her own sorrow the most complete image of misery and distress. The infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of the present instant, which can never be great. With regard to the future it is perfectly secure, and in its thoughtlessness and want of foresight, possesses an antidote against fear and anxiety, the great tormentors of the human breast, from which reason and philosophy will in vain attempt to defend it when it grows up to a man.

We sympathize even with the dead, and, overlooking what is of real importance in their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike our senses, but can have no influence upon their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated in a little time from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations. Surely, we imagine, we can never feel too much for those who have suffered so dreadful a calamity. The tribute of our fellow-feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they are in danger of being forgot by everybody; and by the vain honours which we pay to their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery, artificially to keep alive our melancholy remembrance of their misfortune. That our sympathy can afford them no consolation, seems to be an addition to their calamity; and to think that all we

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