the House of Commons
appointed to inquire into the causes of the war in the Carnatic, and he
impressed himself upon the House as an authority upon India of no mean
order, both in the report from that committee and in a bill which he
himself introduced for the purpose of dealing with the Indian question.
He did not succeed in carrying his measure, but he took care that his
knowledge of his subject increased in proportion to its growing
importance in the public view, and his ready eloquence and specious show
of information made him a very valuable ally for Pitt and a fairly
formidable opponent to Fox in the heady debates over the measures to
which the political honor of the dishonorable coalition was pledged.

The India Bill had a more serious enemy than Dundas, a more serious enemy
than Pitt so far as the immediate effect of enmity upon public opinion is
to be estimated. There was an attorney in London named James Sayer whose
private means enabled him to neglect his profession and devote himself to
the production of political caricatures and squibs. Sayer was one of the
many who believed in the rising star of Pitt, and he proved his belief by
the publication of a caricature which Fox himself is said to have
admitted gave the India Bill its severest blow in public estimation.
This caricature was called "Carlo Khan's Triumphal Entry into Leadenhall
Street." It represented Fox in the grotesque attire of a theatrical
Oriental potentate, and with a smile of conquest upon his black-haired
face, perched upon an elephant with the staring countenance of Lord
North, that was led by Burke, whose spectacled acridity was swollen with
the blowing of a trumpet from which depended a map of India. The {234}
caricature was ingenious, timely, and extraordinarily efficacious in
harming the measure and its champions. It had an enormous sale; it was
imitated and pirated far and wide. It carried to all parts of the
kingdom the conviction that Fox was aiming at nothing less than a
dictatorship of India, and it intensified the general animosity towards
the measures and the men of the Coalition Ministry more effectively than
any amount of speeches in Westminster could have done. But it had no
more power to weaken the solid majority of the Ministry in the House of
Commons than the hurried erudition of Dundas, or than what Walpole called
the "Bristol stone" of Pitt's eloquence as contrasted with the "diamond
reason" of Fox's solid sense. Nei