be given away on irrelevant considerations. Their
system, with all its faults, insured the acquisition of a certain
considerable competency in administration before a servant reached an
elevation at which he could do much harm.

Burke defended the Bill (December 1, 1783) in one of the speeches
which rank only below his greatest, and it contains two or three
passages of unsurpassed energy and impressiveness. Everybody knows the
fine page about Fox as the descendant of Henry IV. of France, and the
happy quotation from Silius Italicus. Every book of British eloquence
contains the magnificent description of the young magistrates who
undertake the government and the spoliation of India; how, "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 of passage, with appetites
continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting." How they
return home laden with spoil: "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."
How in India all the vices operate by which sudden fortune is
acquired; while in England are often displayed by the same person
the virtues which dispense hereditary wealth, so that "here the
manufacturer and the husbandman will bless the just and punctual hand
that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the scanty
portion of rice and salt from the peasant of Bengal, or wrung from him
the very opium in which he forgot his oppression and his oppressors."

No degree of eloquence, however, could avail to repair faults alike
in structure and in tactics. The whole design was a masterpiece of
hardihood, miscalculation, and mismanagement. The combination of
interests against the Bill was instant, and it was indeed formidable.
The great army of returned nabobs, of directors, of proprietors of
East India stock, rose up in all its immense force. Every member of
every corporation that enjoyed privilege by charter, felt the attack
on the Company as if it had been a blow directed against himself.
The general public had no particular passion for purity or good
government, and the best portion of the public was disgusted with the
Coalition. The king saw his chance. With politic audacity he put so