s terse
sentences contrast strangely with the somewhat more lumbering and
elaborate paragraphs of Burke. "What," he exclaims, putting his argument
in his favorite interrogative form,--"what is the most odious species of
tyranny? Precisely that which this bill is meant to annihilate. That a
handful of men, free themselves, should exercise the most base and
abominable despotism over millions of their fellow-creatures; that
innocence should be the victim of oppression; that industry should toil
for rapine; that the harmless laborer should sweat, not for his own
benefit, but for the luxury and rapacity of tyrannic depredation;--in a
word, that thirty millions of men, gifted by Providence with the
ordinary endowments of humanity, should groan under a system of
despotism unmatched in all the histories of the world? What is the end
of all government? Certainly, the happiness of the governed. Others may
hold different opinions; but this is mine, and I proclaim it. What,
then, are we to think of a government whose good fortune is supposed to
spring from the calamities of its subjects, whose aggrandizement grows
out of the miseries of mankind? This is the kind of government exercised
under the East Indian Company upon the natives of Hindostan; and the
subversion of that infamous government is the main object of the bill in
question." And afterwards he says, with admirable point and pungency of
statement: "Every line in both the bills which I have had the honor to
introduce, presumes the possibility of bad administration; for every
word breathes suspicion. This bill supposes that men are but men. It
confides in no integrity; it trusts no character; it inculcates the
wisdom of a jealousy of power, and annexes responsibility, not only to
every _action_, but even to the _inaction_ of those who are to dispense
it. The necessity of these provisions must be evident, when it is known
that the different misfortunes of the company have resulted not more
from what their servants _did_, than from what the _masters did not_."

There is a directness in such sentences as these which we do not find in
Burke's speech on the East India Bill; but Burke's remains as a part of
English literature, and in form and substance, especially in substance,
is so immensely superior to that of Fox, that, in quoting sentences from
the latter, one may almost be supposed to rescue them from that neglect
which attends all speeches which do not reach beyond the occas