Macaulay, in a famous passage of dazzling lustre and fine historic colour, describes Burke’s holy rage against the misdeeds of Hastings as due to his sensibility.  But sensibility to what?  Not merely to those common impressions of human suffering which kindle the flame of ordinary philanthropy, always attractive, often so beneficent, but often so capricious and so laden with secret detriment.  This was no part of Burke’s type.  For is it enough to say that Burke had what is the distinctive mark of the true statesman, a passion for good, wise, and orderly government.  He had that in the strongest degree.  All that wore the look of confusion he held in abhorrence, and he detected the seeds of confusion with a penetration that made other men marvel.  He was far too wise a man to have any sympathy with the energetic exercise of power for power’s sake.  He knew well that triumphs of violence are for the most part little better than temporary makeshifts, which leave all the work of government to be encountered afterwards by men of essentially greater capacity than the hero of force without scruple.  But he regarded those whom he called the great bad men of the old stamp, Cromwell, Richelieu, the Guises, the Condes, with a certain tolerance, because “though the virtues of such men were not to be taken as a balance to their crimes, yet they had long views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, and not the destruction of their country.”  What he valued was the deep-seated order of systems that worked by the accepted uses, opinions, beliefs, prejudices of a community.

This love of right and stable order was not all.  That was itself the growth from a deeper root, partly of conviction and partly of sympathy; the conviction of the rare and difficult conjunctures of circumstance which are needed for the formation of even the rudest forms of social union among mankind; and then the sympathy that the best men must always find it hard to withhold from any hoary fabric of belief, and any venerated system of government that has cherished a certain order and shed even a ray of the faintest dawn among the violences and the darkness of the race.  It was reverence rather than sensibility, a noble and philosophic conservatism rather than philanthropy, which raised the storm in Burke’s breast against the rapacity of English adventurers in India and the imperial crimes of Hastings.  Exactly the same tide of emotion which afterwards filled to the brim the cup of prophetic anger against the desecrators of the Church and the monarchy of France, now poured itself out against those who in India had “tossed about, subverted, and tore to pieces, as if it were in the gambols of boyish unluckiness and malice, the most established rights and the most ancient and most revered institutions of ages and nations.”  From beginning to end of the fourteen years in which Burke pursued his campaign against Hastings, we see in every page that the India which ever glowed before