was an infamy, if the deposition of Chait Singh
and the plundering of the Begums were crimes, then no possible
advantage that these acts might cause to the temporal greatness of the
State could weigh for one moment in the balance with Burke. In the
high court of Burke's mind Warren Hastings was a doomed, a degraded
man, even though it could have been proved, as indeed it would have
been hard to prove, that any ill deeds which Warren Hastings had done
were essential to the maintenance of English rule and English glory in
India. Burke argued that English rule in India, English glory in
India, did not gain but only lost by ill deeds. But if England's gain
and England's glory in India depended upon such deeds, he for his part
would have refused the gain and shuddered at the glory.

If Burke's all-conquering passion was a passion for justice, perhaps
his keenest political taste was for India and the affairs of India. At
a time when our Indian Empire was merely in its dawn, at a time when
the affairs of India were looked upon by the nation at large as the
commercial matters of a company, Burke allowed all the resources of his
great mind to be employed in the study of India. He {273} knew
India--he who had never sailed its seas or touched its shores--as
probably no other Englishmen of his time knew India, not even those
whose lives had been for the most part passed in the country. And this
comprehensive knowledge Burke was able to impart again with a readiness
that was never unreliable, with a copiousness that was never redundant.
He gave a fascination to the figures of Indian finance; he made the
facts of contemporary Indian history live with all the charm of the
most famous events of Greek or Roman history. India in his hands
became what it rightly is, but what few had thought it till then, one
of the most fascinating of human studies. Indian affairs on his lips
allied all the allurement of a romance with all the statistical
accuracy of a Parliamentary report. Such a genius for the presentation
of facts inspired by such a passion for justice has enriched English
literature with some of its noblest and most truthful pages.

The pith of all Burke's Indian policy, the text upon which all his
splendid sermons of Indian administration were preached, is to be found
in one single sentence of the famous speech on the Nabob of Arcot's
debts. In that single sentence the whole of Burke's theory of
government is summed up wit