that lay at our very door.  Burke could not, in his calmer moments, have failed to recognise all this.  Yet he lent himself to the party cry that Pitt was taking his first measures for the re-enslavement of Ireland.  Had it not been for what he himself called the delirium of the preceding session, and which had still not subsided, he would have seen that Pitt was in truth taking his first measures for the effective deliverance of Ireland from an unjust and oppressive subordination.  The same delirium committed him to another equally deplorable perversity, when he opposed, with as many excesses in temper as fallacies in statesmanship, the wise treaty with France, in which Pitt partially anticipated the commercial policy of an ampler treaty three-quarters of a century afterwards.

A great episode in Burke’s career now opened.  It was in 1785 that Warren Hastings returned from India, after a series of exploits as momentous and far-reaching, for good or evil, as have ever been achieved by any English ruler.  For years Burke had been watching India.  With rising wonder, amazement, and indignation he had steadily followed that long train of intrigue and crime which had ended in the consolidation of a new empire.  With the return of Hastings he felt that the time had come for striking a severe blow, and making a signal example.  He gave notice (June 1785) that he would, at a future day, make a motion respecting the conduct of a gentleman just returned from India.

Among minor considerations, we have to remember that Indian affairs entered materially into the great battle of parties.  It was upon an Indian bill that the late ministry had made shipwreck.  It was notoriously by the aid of potent Indian interests that the new ministry had acquired a portion of its majority.  To expose the misdeeds of our agents in India was at once to strike the minister who had dexterously secured their support, and to attack one of the great strongholds of parliamentary corruption.  The proceedings against Hastings were, in the first instance, regarded as a sequel to the struggle over Fox’s East India Bill.  That these considerations were present in Burke’s thought there is no doubt, but they were purely secondary.  It was India itself that stood above all else in his imagination.  It had filled his mind and absorbed his time while Pitt was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, and Burke was looking forward to match his plan of economic reform with a greater plan of Indian reform.  In the Ninth Report, the Eleventh Report, and in his speech on the India Bill of 1783, he had shown both how thoroughly he had mastered the facts, and how profoundly they had stirred his sense of wrong.  The masterpiece known as the speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s debts, delivered in Parliament on a motion for papers (1785), handles matters of account, of interest turned into principal, and principal superadded to principal; it deals with a hundred minute technicalities of teeps