uple. But he regarded those whom he called the great
bad men of the old stamp, Cromwell, Richelieu, the Guises, the Condes,
with a certain tolerance, because "though the virtues of such men were
not to be taken as a balance to their crimes, yet they had long views,
and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, and not
the destruction of their country." What he valued was the deep-seated
order of systems that worked by the accepted uses, opinions, beliefs,
prejudices of a community.

This love of right and stable order was not all. That was itself
the growth from a deeper root, partly of conviction and partly of
sympathy; the conviction of the rare and difficult conjunctures of
circumstance which are needed for the formation of even the rudest
forms of social union among mankind; and then the sympathy that the
best men must always find it hard to withhold from any hoary fabric of
belief, and any venerated system of government that has cherished
a certain order and shed even a ray of the faintest dawn among the
violences and the darkness of the race. It was reverence rather
than sensibility, a noble and philosophic conservatism rather than
philanthropy, which raised the storm in Burke's breast against the
rapacity of English adventurers in India and the imperial crimes of
Hastings. Exactly the same tide of emotion which afterwards filled to
the brim the cup of prophetic anger against the desecrators of the
Church and the monarchy of France, now poured itself out against those
who in India had "tossed about, subverted, and tore to pieces, as if
it were in the gambols of boyish unluckiness and malice, the most
established rights and the most ancient and most revered institutions
of ages and nations." From beginning to end of the fourteen years in
which Burke pursued his campaign against Hastings, we see in every
page that the India which ever glowed before his vision was not the
home of picturesque usages and melodramatic costume, but rather, in
his own words, the land of princes once of great dignity, authority,
and opulence; of an ancient and venerable priesthood, the guides of
the people while living, and their consolation in death; of a nobility
of antiquity and renown; of millions of ingenious mechanics, and
millions of diligent tillers of the earth; and finally, the land
where might be found almost all the religions professed by men--the
Brahminical, the Mussulman, the Eastern and the Western Christian.