and advocacy for reform strikingly resembled Burke,—­had he remained uninjured to our day, with increasing intellectual powers and profounder moral wisdom, I doubt whether even he would have had much influence with our present legislators; for he had all the intellectual defects of both Burke and Webster, and never was so popular as either of them at one period of their career, while he certainly was inferior to both in native force, experience, and attainments.

The chief labors of Burke for the first ten years of his parliamentary life had been mainly in connection with American affairs, and which the result proved he comprehended better than any man in England.  Those of the next ten years were directed principally to Indian difficulties, in which he showed the same minuteness of knowledge, the same grasp of intellect, the same moral wisdom, the same good sense, and the same regard for justice, that he had shown concerning the colonies.  But in discussing Indian affairs his eloquence takes a loftier flight; he is less conciliating, more in earnest, more concerned with the principles of immutable obligations.  He abhors the cruelties and tyranny inflicted on India by Clive and Hastings.  He could see no good from an aggrandizement purchased by injustice and wrong.  If it was criminal for an individual to cheat and steal, it was equally atrocious for a nation to plunder and oppress another nation, infidel or pagan, white or black.  A righteous anger burned in the breast of Burke as he reflected on the wrongs and miseries of the natives of India.  Why should that ancient country be ruled for no other purpose than to enrich the younger sons of a grasping aristocracy and the servants of an insatiable and unscrupulous Company whose monopoly of spoils was the scandal of the age?  If ever a reform was imperative in the government of a colony, it was surely in India, where the government was irresponsible.  The English courts of justice there were more terrible to the natives than the very wrongs they pretended to redress.  The customs and laws and moral ideas of the conquered country were spurned and ignored by the greedy scions of gentility who were sent to rule a population ten times larger than that between the Humber and the Thames.

So Burke, after the most careful study of the condition of India, lifted up his voice against the iniquities which were winked at by Parliament.  But his fierce protest arrayed against him all the parties that indorsed these wrongs, or who were benefited by them.  I need not dwell on his protracted labors for ten years in behalf of right, without the sympathies of those who had formerly supported him.  No speeches were ever made in the English House of Commons which equalled, in eloquence and power, those he made on the Nabob of Arcot’s debts and the impeachment of Warren Hastings.  In these famous philippics, he fearlessly exposed the peculations, the misrule, the oppression, and the inhuman heartlessness of the Company’s