ue, is often victorious
on the wide and general outcome. Looking back across the ninety years
that divide us from that memorable scene in Westminster Hall, we may
see that Burke had more success than at first appeared. If he did not
convict the man, he overthrew a system, and stamped its principles
with lasting censure and shame. Burke had perhaps a silent conviction
that it would have been better for us and for India if Clive had
succeeded in his attempt to blow out his own brains in the Madras
counting-house, or if the battle of Plassy had been a decisive defeat
instead of a decisive victory. "All these circumstances," he once
said, in reference to the results of the investigation of the Select
Committee, "are not, I confess, very favourable to the idea of our
attempting to govern India at all. But there we are: there we are
placed by the Sovereign Disposer, and we must do the best we can in
our situation. The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty." If
that situation is better understood now than it was a century ago, and
that duty more loftily conceived, the result is due, so far as such
results can ever be due to one man's action apart from the confluence
of the deep impersonal elements of time, to the seeds of justice and
humanity which were sown by Burke and his associates. Nobody now
believes that Clive was justified in tricking Omichund by forging
another man's name; that Impey was justified in hanging Nuncomar for
committing the very offence for which Clive was excused or applauded,
although forgery is no grave crime according to Hindoo usage, and it
is the gravest according to English usage; that Hastings did well
in selling English troops to assist in the extermination of a brave
people with whom he was at peace; that Benfield did well in conniving
with an Eastern prince in a project of extortion against his subjects.
The whole drift of opinion has changed, and it is since the trial of
Hastings that the change has taken place. The question in Burke's
time was whether oppression and corruption were to continue to be the
guiding maxims of English policy. The personal disinterestedness of
the ruler who had been the chief founder of this policy, and had most
openly set aside all pretence of righteous principle, was dust in the
balance. It was impossible to suppress the policy without striking a
deadly blow at its most eminent and powerful instrument. That Hastings
was acquitted, was immaterial. The lesson