In answer, he says that he adheres to the reasons which had before induced him to withhold his consent, and composedly invites me to lay before the Board a complete detail of the plan for conducting the war, a comparative state of the whole of the object with the whole of the means of attaining it, and the final extent of my demands on the Mahrattas, or what concession I would make to them: and he promises to enter into the consideration of these points with the utmost candour. If his design in this enquiry was simply to gain information, I might refer him to the large and confidential discussions in which I have laid all my views open to his, with all the grounds on which they were formed. If his purpose was to enable him to form a more clear or competent judgment of the plans which I have proposed, its object would be lost in the time required for the deliberation. But in truth I do not trust to his promise of candour, convinced that he is incapable of it, and that his sole purpose and wish are to embarrass and defeat every measure which I may undertake or which may tend even to promote the public interests, if my credit is connected with them. Such has been the tendency, and such the manifest spirit of all his actions from the beginning. Almost every measure proposed by me has for that reason had his opposition to it. carried against his opposition, and too far engaged to be withdrawn, yet even then and in every stage of it, his labours to overcome it have been unremitted; every disappointment and misfortune have been aggravated by him, and every fabricated tale of armies devoted to famine or to massacre have found their first and ready way to his office, where it was known they would meet the most welcome reception. To the same design may be attributed the annual computations of declining finances and an exhausted treasury, computations which though made in the time of abundance must verge to truth at last, from the effect of a discordant government, not a constitutional decay. To the same design shall I attribute the policy of accelerating the boded event, and creating an artificial want, by keeping up an useless hoard of treasure, and withholding it from a temporary circulation.

When

I am aware of the answer which will be made to these imputations and I will anticipate it. Mr. Francis may safely deny them, for they are incapable of positive evidence. He may complain of the injustice or indecency of assuming the interpretation of his thoughts, and assigning intentions to him, upon the reality of which he alone can pronounce with certainty. He may claim an equal right to recriminate upon me, and to

pass the same free judgment upon the motives which have influenced my public actions. Against such conclusions I trust that my character will be sufficient to defend me, unless some known instance of it can be produced as a warrant for them, and such I am certain do not exist, either known or unknown.

My authority for the opinions which I have declared concerning Mr. Francis depends upon facts which have passed within my own certain knowledge. I judge of his public conduct by my experience of his private, which I have found to be void of truth and honour. This is a severe charge, but temperately and deliberately made, from the firm persuasion that I owe this justice to the public and to myself, as the only redress to both, for artifices of which I have been a victim, and which threaten to involve their interests with disgrace and ruin. The only redress for a fraud for which the law has made no provisions is the exposure of it. I proceed to the proofs of my allegation.

In the latter end of the month of February last Mr. Francis concluded with me an engagement of which one Article alone is necessary to the present occasion. It is as follows

"Mr. Francis will not oppose any measures which the Governor-General shall recommend for the prosecution of the war in which we are supposed to be engaged with the Mahrattas, or for the general support of the present political system of this Government. Neither will he himself either propose, or vote with any other member who shall propose, any measure that shall be contrary to the Governor-General's opinion on these points."

By the sanction of this engagement, and the liberal professions which accompanied it, I was seduced to part with the friend1 to whose generous and honourable support steadfastly yielded in a course of six years I am indebted for the existence of the little power which I have ever possessed in that long and disgraceful period, to throw myself on the mercy of Mr. Francis, and on the desperate hazard of his integrity. It was impossible to afford a stronger demonstration of the good faith with which I entered into this accommodation, nor of my confidence in his, than thus consenting to deprive myself of the means of breaking the engagement on my part, and of preventing the breach of it on his and surely this difference in our relative situations ought to have impressed him with a sense of what he owed to the delicacy attending it, and have made him dread even an

1 Barwell.

approach towards the precise line of his obligations, by the slightest advantage taken of my inability to repel it and how much more ought it to have restrained him from the direct transgression of it!

I must now revert to the Article of Mr. Francis's engagement which I have recited above, and to the minutes lately delivered to the Board under the signatures of Messieurs Francis and Wheler. On these I rest the proofs which I have promised of the charge herein preferred against Mr. Francis.

If it shall appear on a fair comparison of these evidences that Mr. Francis has faithfully adhered to his engagements, I have wrongfully accused him. If on the contrary, it shall appear that in violation of these engagements he has opposed any measures which I have recommended for the prosecution of the war in which we are engaged with the Mahrattas, or for the general support of the present political system of this Government, or that he has either himself proposed or joined with another member in proposing a measure contrary to my opinion on these points, my charge is established. I wish to avoid a repetition of the terms of it.

WARREN HASTINGS.

102. THE STEAM ENGINE (1770-85).1

The steam engine, which has been such an agent of material progress during the past 125 years, was perfected, not invented, by Watt. Nevertheless, by turning a more or less floating idea into concrete form, he established a just claim to be always remembered in connection with the endless applications of steam power to industry. He was no rough mechanic (as will be seen from Jeffrey's estimate of his character), but an engineer of fine tastes and broad sympathies. In England's struggle with Napoleon the steam engine was a force of the first magnitude: not at sea, because Trafalgar was fought before steamships were introduced, but on land, in creating the sinews of war which were turned against France. Lord Jeffrey, the author of this eulogy, was a distinguished critic and editor of the Edinburgh Review.

1 Jeffrey's appreciation was not written till 1819, the year of Watt's death, but is inserted earlier because Watt was a prominent engineer from 1770 forward. Muirhead fixes 1785 as the time of his greatest activity and inventiveness.

SOURCE.-Muirhead's Life of Watt. Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850). New York, 1859. P. 402.

We have said that Mr. Watt was the great improver of the steam-engine; but, in truth, as to all that is admirable in its structure, or vast in its utility, he should rather be described as its inventor. It was by his inventions that its action was so regulated, as to make it capable of being applied to the finest and most delicate manufactures, and its power so increased, as to set weight and solidity at defiance. By his admirable contrivance, it has become a thing stupendous alike for its force and its flexibility, for the prodigious power which it can exert, and the ease, and precision and ductility, with which it can be varied, distributed and applied. The trunk of an elephant, that can pick up a pin or rend an oak, is as nothing to it. It can engrave a seal, and crush masses of obdurate metal before it,-draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as a gossamer, and lift a ship of war like a bauble in the air. It can embroider muslin and forge anchors,-cut steel into ribbons, and impel loaded vessels against the fury of the winds and waves.

It would be difficult to estimate the value of the benefits which these inventions have conferred upon this country. There is no branch of industry that has not been indebted to them; and, in all the most material, they have not only widened most magnificently the field of its exertions, but multiplied a thousandfold the amount of its productions. It is our improved steam-engine that has fought the battles of Europe, and exalted and sustained, through the late tremendous contest, the political greatness of our land. It is the same great power which now enables us to pay the interest of our debt, and to maintain the arduous struggle in which we are still engaged [1819] with the skill and capital of countries less oppressed with taxation. But these are poor and narrow views of its importance. It has increased indefinitely the mass of human comforts and enjoyments, and rendered cheap and accessible, all over the world, the materials of wealth and prosperity. It has armed the feeble hand of man, in short, with a power to which no limits can be assigned; completed the dominion of mind over the most refractory qualities of matter; and laid a sure foundation for all those future miracles of mechanic power which are to aid and reward the labours of after generations. It is to the genius of one man, too, that all this is mainly owing; and certainly no man ever bestowed such a gift on his kind. The blessing is not only universal, but unbounded;

and the fabled inventors of the plough and the loom, who were deified by the erring gratitude of their rude contemporaries, conferred less important benefits on mankind than the inventor of our present steam-engine.

This will be the fame of Watt with future generations; and it is sufficient for his race and his country. But to those to whom he more immediately belonged, who lived in his society and enjoyed his conversation, it is not, perhaps, the character in which he will be most frequently recalled, most deeply lamented, or even most highly admired. Independently of his great attainments in mechanics, Mr. Watt was an extraordinary, and in many respects a wonderful man. Perhaps no individual in his age possessed so much and such varied and exact information,— had read so much, or remembered what he had read so accurately and well. He had infinite quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodising power of understanding, which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense, and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them. It seemed as if every subject that was casually started in conversation with him, had been that which he had been last occupied in studying and exhausting;—such was the copiousness, the precision and the admirable clearness of the information which he poured out upon it without effort or hesitation. Nor was this promptitude and compass of knowledge confined in any degree to the studies connected with his ordinary pursuits. That he should have been minutely and extensively skilled in chemistry and the arts, and in most of the branches of physical science, might perhaps have been conjectured; but it could not have been inferred from his usual occupations, and probably is not generally known that he was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity, metaphysics, medicine and etymology, and perfectly at home in all the details of architecture, music and law. He was well acquainted, too, with most of the modern languages, and familiar with their most recent literature. Nor was it at all extraordinary to hear the great mechanician and engineer detailing and expounding, for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the German logicians, or criticising the measures or the matter of the German poetry.