Is this power of organization common among orators?  It seems to me that, on the contrary, it is very rare.  In some of Burke’s speeches, in which his sensibility and imagination were thoroughly under the control of his judgment, as, for instance, his speech on Conciliation with America, that on Economical Reform, and that to the Electors of Bristol, we find the orator to be a consummate master of the art of so constructing a speech that it serves the immediate object which prompted its delivery, while at the same time it has in it a principle of vitality which makes it survive the occasion that called it forth.  But the greatest of Burke’s speeches, if we look merely at the richness and variety of mental power and the force and depth of moral passion displayed in it, is his speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts.  No speech ever delivered before any assembly, legislative, judicial, or popular, can rank with this in respect to the abundance of its facts, reasonings, and imagery, and the ferocity of its moral wrath.  It resembles the El Dorado that Voltaire’s Candide visited, where the boys played with precious stones of inestimable value, as our boys play with ordinary marbles; for to the inhabitants of El Dorado diamonds and pearls were as common as pebbles are with us.

But the defect of this speech, which must still be considered, on the whole, the most inspired product of Burke’s great nature, was this,—­ that it did not strike its hearers or readers as having reality for its basis or the superstructure raised upon it.  Englishmen could not believe then, and most of them probably do not believe now, that it had any solid foundation in incontrovertible facts.  It did not “fit in” to their ordinary modes of thought; and it has never been ranked with Burke’s “organized” orations; it has never come home to what Bacon called the “business and bosoms” of his countrymen.  They have generally dismissed it from their imaginations as “a phantasmagoria and a hideous dream” created by Burke under the impulse of the intense hatred he felt for the administration which succeeded the overthrow of the government, which was founded on the coalition of Fox and North.

Now, in simple truth, the speech is the most masterly statement of facts, relating to the oppression of millions of the people of India, which was ever forced on the attention of the House of Commons,—­a legislative assembly which, it may be incidentally remarked, was practically responsible for the just government of the immense Indian empire of Great Britain.  It is curious that the main facts on which the argument of Burke rests have been confirmed by James Mill, the coldest-blooded historian that ever narrated the enormous crimes which attended the rise and progress of the British power in Hindostan, and a man who also had a strong intellectual antipathy to the mind of Burke.  In making the speech, Burke had documentary evidence of a large portion of the transactions he denounced,