servants,—­speeches which extorted admiration, while they humiliated and chastised.  I need not describe the nine years’ prosecution of a great criminal, and the escape of Hastings, more guilty and more fortunate than Verres, from the punishment he merited, through legal technicalities, the apathy of men in power, the private influence of the throne, and the sympathies which fashion excited in his behalf,—­and, more than all, because of the undoubted service he had rendered to his country, if it was a service to extend her rule by questionable means to the farthermost limits of the globe.  I need not speak of the obloquy which Burke incurred from the press, which teemed with pamphlets and books and articles to undermine his great authority, all in the interests of venal and powerful monopolists.  Nor did he escape the wrath of the electors of Bristol,—­a narrow-minded town of India traders and Negro dealers,—­who withdrew from him their support.  He had been solicited, in the midst of his former eclat, to represent this town, rather than the “rotten borough” of Wendover; and he proudly accepted the honor, and was the idol of his constituents until he presumed to disregard their instructions in matters of which he considered they were incompetent to judge.  His famous letter to the electors, in which he refutes and ridicules their claim to instruct him, as the shoemakers of Lynn wished to instruct Daniel Webster, is a model of irony, as well as a dignified rebuke of all ignorant constituencies, and a lofty exposition of the duties of a statesman rather than of a politician.

He had also incurred the displeasure of the Bristol electors by his manly defence of the rights of the Irish Catholics, who since the conquest of William III. had been subjected to the most unjust and annoying treatment that ever disgraced a Protestant government.  The injustices under which Ireland groaned were nearly as repulsive as the cruelties inflicted upon the Protestants of France during the reign of Louis XIV.  “On the suppression of the rebellion under Tyrconnel,” says Morley, “nearly the whole of the land was confiscated, the peasants were made beggars and outlaws, the Penal Laws against Catholics were enforced, and the peasants were prostrate in despair.”  Even in 1765 “the native Irish were regarded by their Protestant oppressors with exactly that combination of intense contempt and loathing, rage and terror, which his American counterpart would have divided between the Indian and the Negro.”  Not the least of the labors of Burke was to bring to the attention of the nation the wrongs inflicted on the Irish, and the impossibility of ruling a people who had such just grounds for discontent.  “His letter upon the propriety of admitting the Catholics to the elective franchise is one of the wisest of all his productions,—­so enlightened is its idea of toleration, so sagacious is its comprehension of political exigencies.”  He did not live to see his ideas carried out, but he was among the first to prepare the way for Catholic emancipation in later times.