EDMUND BURKE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOE:]
Sin,— May I humbly venture to question your judgment on Burke ? You seem to base it mainly, if not exclusively, on his
impeachment of Warren Hastings. If subsequent inquiry
has succeeded in proving extenuating circumstances in mitigation of Burke's indictment, surely it can hardly be denied that Burke's language was amply justified by the evidence on which he relied. The great speech against Warren Hastings should be read together with Burke's speech on Fox's India Bill in order to appreciate Burke's burning indignation against the way in which the rapacity of Anglo. Indians was not only inflicting cruel wrongs on the natives of
India, but corrupting English society in addition. Of those Nabobs Burke said :—
"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 ail the vices operate by which sudden fortunes are made. In England are often displayed by the same persons the virtues which dispense hereditary wealth."
It was the sight of "the destroyers of the nobility and gentry of a whole kingdom" returning home with their ill- gotten hoards to corrupt society and the constituencies that roused Burke's sxva indignatio, and made him determined to make an example of one whom he regarded as the chief of them. The indignation excited by Mr. Cecil Rhodes and his Raid was mild compared to the feeling raised in England against the class of whom Warren Hastings was considered— even by Pitt—to have been a type. And Burke's language, after all, never descended to the vulgar personalities which some of his contemporaries—even Pitt—sometimes allowed themselves to employ in Parliamentary debate.* Burke's impeachment of Warren Hastings made the British nation realise for the first time its terrible responsibilities for the administration of India and other British dependencies. Surely Burke towers like a giant above all his Parliamentary contemporaries. Ireland, which Pitt sacrificed to his political ambition, would now be a prosperous and loyal part of the British Empire if Burke's "political diagnosis" had been carried out in practice.—I am, Sir, &c.,
MALCOLM MAC COLL. [ * Burke called Warren Hastings "a spider of hell."—Ere Spectator.]
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