office. This has long been a bone of contention
between lawyers and statesmen. The Peers in the course of the trial had
taken the opinion of the judges frequently, and had followed it in
deciding on the admissibility of evidence, a great deal of which was
important to the prosecution. The report maintained, and with apparently
unanswerable force, that when a legislature sits on offenses against the
State, it constitutes a grand inquest which makes its own rules of
evidence; and is not and ought not to be tied up by the rules
administered in the ordinary law courts, and formed for the most part
for the guidance of the unskilled and often uneducated men who compose
juries. As a manual for the instruction of legislative committees of
inquiry it is therefore still very valuable, if it be not a final
authority.

Burke, during and after the Warren Hastings trial, fell into
considerable neglect and unpopularity. His zeal in the prosecution had
grown as the public interest in it declined, until it approached the
point of fanaticism. He took office in the coalition which succeeded the
Fox Whigs, and when the French Revolution broke out it found him
somewhat broken in nerves, irritated by his failures, and in less
cordial relations with some of his old friends and colleagues. He at
once arrayed himself fiercely against the Revolution, and broke finally
with what might be called the Liberty of all parties and creeds, and
stood forth to the world as the foremost champion of authority,
prescription, and precedent. Probably none of his writings are so
familiar to the general public as those which this crisis produced, such
as the 'Thoughts on the French Revolution' and the 'Letters on a
Regicide Peace.' They are and will always remain, apart from the
splendor of the rhetoric, extremely interesting as the last words spoken
by a really great man on behalf of the old order. Old Europe made
through him the best possible defense of itself. He told, as no one else
could have told it, the story of what customs, precedent, prescription,
and established usage had done for its civilization; and he told it
nevertheless as one who was the friend of rational progress, and had
taken no small part in promoting it. Only one other writer who followed
him came near equaling him as a defender of the past, and that was
Joseph de Maistre; but he approached the subject mainly from the
religious side. To him the old regime was the order of Providence. To