getting a consciousness of the
common brotherhood of man. Even at the close of the American war this
feeling had become strong enough to colour our political life. It told
on the attitude of England towards its great dependency of India.
Discussions over rival plans of Indian administration diffused a sense
of national responsibility for its good government, and there was a
general resolve that the security against injustice and misrule which
was enjoyed by the poorest Englishman should be enjoyed by the poorest
Hindoo. It was this resolve which expressed itself in 1786 in the trial
of Warren Hastings. Hastings returned from India at the close of the war
with the hope of rewards as great as those of Clive. He had saved all
that Clive had won. He had laid the foundation of a vast empire in the
East. He had shown rare powers of administration, and the foresight,
courage, and temperance which mark the born ruler of men. But with him
came rumours of tyranny and wrong. Even those who admitted the wisdom
and glory of his rule shrank from its terrible ruthlessness. He was
charged with having sold for a vast sum the services of British troops
to crush the free tribes of the Rohillas, with having wrung
half-a-million by extortion from the Rajah of Benares, with having
extorted by torture and starvation more than a million from the
Princesses of Oudh. He was accused of having kept his hold upon power by
measures as unscrupulous, and with having murdered a native who opposed
him by an abuse of the forms of English law. On almost all these charges
the cooler judgement of later inquirers has acquitted Warren Hastings of
guilt. Personally there can be little doubt that he had done much to
secure to the new subjects of Britain a just and peaceable government.
What was hardest and most pitiless in his rule had been simply a
carrying out of the system of administration which was native to India
and which he found existing there. But such a system was alien from the
new humanity of Englishmen; and few dared to vindicate Hastings when
Burke in words of passionate earnestness moved for his impeachment.

[Sidenote: The Slave-Trade.]

The great trial lingered on for years; and in the long run Hastings
secured an acquittal. But the end at which the impeachment aimed had
really been won. The attention, the sympathy of Englishmen had been
drawn across distant seas to a race utterly strange to them; and the
peasant of Cornwall or Cumberland had