with all my attachments to the person of a first magistrate, had I lived in the reign of James the Second, I should most certainly have contributed my efforts, and borne part in those illustrious struggles, which vindicated an empire from hereditary servitude, and recorded this valuable doctrine, that trust abused was revocable.'

6

No man will tell me that a trust to a company of merchants stands upon the solemn and sanctified ground, by which a trust is committed to a monarch; and I am at a loss to reconcile the conduct of men, who approve that resumption of violated trust, which rescued and re-established our unparalleled and admirable constitution, with a thousand valuable improvements and advantages, at the Revolution; and who, at this moment, rise up the champions of the East India Company's charter, although the incapacity and incompetence of that company to a due and adequate discharge of the trust deposited in them by charter, are themes of ridicule and contempt to all the world; and although, in consequence of their mismanage ment, connivance, and imbecility, combined with the wickedness of their servants, the very name of an Englishman is detested, even to a proverb, through all Asia; and the national character is become degraded and dishonoured. To rescue that name from odium, and redeem this character from disgrace, are some of the objects of the present bill; and gentlemen should indeed gravely weigh their opposition to a measure, which, with a thousand other points not less valuable, aims at the attainment of these objects.

Those who condemn the present bill, as a vio

lation of the chartered rights of the East India Company, condemn on the same ground, I say again, the Revolution, as a violation of the chartered rights of king James the Second. He, with as much reason, might have claimed the property of dominion. But what was the language of the people? No, you have no property in dominion: dominion was vested in you, as it is in every chief magistrate, for the benefit of the community to be governed; it was a sacred trust delegated by compact; you have abused the trust; you have exercised dominion for the purposes of vexation and tyranny-not of comfort, protection, and good order; and we therefore resume the power which was originally ours; we recur to the first principles of all government, the will of the many; and it is our will that you shall no longer abuse your dominion.' The case is the same with the East India Company's government over a territory (as it has been said by Mr. Burke) of two hundred and eighty thousand square miles in extent, nearly equal to all Christian Europe, and containing thirty millions of the human race. It matters not whether dominion arises from conquest or from compact. Conquest gives no right to the con queror to be a tyrant; and it is no violation of right, to abolish the authority which is misused.

PART OF A SPEECH OF MR. BURKE ON THE SAME OCCASION. 1783.

THE several irruptions of Arabs, Tartars, and Persians into India were, for the greater part, ferocious and bloody, and wasteful in the extreme : our entrance into the dominion of that country, was, as generally, with small comparative effusion of blood, being introduced by various frauds and delusions, and by taking advantage of the incurable, blind, and senseless animosity, which the several country powers bear towards each other, rather than by open force. But the difference in favour of the first conquerors is this: the Asiatic conquerors very soon abated of their ferocity, because they made the conquered country their own. They rose or fell with the rise or fall of the territory they lived in. Fathers there deposited the hopes of their posterity, and children there beheld the monuments of their fathers. Here their lot was finally cast, and it is the natural wish of all, that their lot should not be cast in a bad land. Poverty, sterility, and desolation, are not a recreating prospect to the eye of man, and there are very few who can bear to grow old among the curses of a whole people. If their passion or their avarice drove the Tartar lords to acts of rapacity, or tyranny, there was time enough, even in the short life of man, to bring round the ill effects of an abuse of power upon the power itself. If hoards were made by violence and tyranny, they were still domestic hoards; and domestic profusion, or the rapine of a more powerful and prodigal hand, restored them to the people. With

many disorders, and with few political checks upon power, nature had still fair play; the sources of acquisition were not dried up, and therefore the trade, the manufactures, and the commerce of the country flourished. Even avarice and usury itself operated both for the preservation and the employment of national wealth. The husbandman' and manufacturer paid heavy interest, but then they augmented the fund from whence they were again to borrow. Their resources were dearly bought, but they were sure, and the general stock of the community grew by the general effort.

But under the English government all this order is reversed. The Tartar invasion was mischievous; but it is our protection that destroys India. It was their enmity, but it is our friendship: our conquest there, after twenty years, is as crude as it was the first day. The natives scarcely know what it is to see the grey head of an Englishman. Young men (boys almost) govern there without society, and without sympathy with the natives. They have no more social habits with the people, than if they still resided in England, nor indeed any species of intercourse, but that which is necessary to making a sudden fortune, with a view to a remote settlement. Animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another, wave after wave, and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India. With us are no retributory

superstitions, by which a foundation of charity compensates, through ages, to the poor, for the rapine and injustice of a day. With us no pride erects stately monuments, which repair the mischiefs which pride had produced, and which adorn a country out of its own spoils. England has erected no churches, no hospitals, no palaces, no schools. England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations, dug out no reservoirs. Every other conqueror of every other de scription has left some monument, either of state or beneficence, behind him. Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by any thing better than the ouran-outang, or the tiger.

There is nothing in the boys we send to India worse than the boys whom we are whipping at school, or that we see trailing a pike or bending over a desk at home. But as English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for remedy of the excesses of their premature power. The consequences of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in England, and the cries of India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about in every breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing ocean. In India all the vices