urke's speeches against Warren Hastings must ever remain
among the highest examples of human eloquence employed in the service
of the right. The gifts of the statesman, the philosopher, the orator,
the great man of letters, are all allied in those marvellous pages
which first taught Englishmen how closely their national honor as well
as their national prosperity was involved in the administration of
justice in India. If Burke failed to convict Warren Hastings, he
succeeded in convicting the system which made such misdemeanors as
Warren Hastings's possible. We owe to Burke a new India. What had
been but the appanage of a corrupt and corrupting Company he
practically made forever a part of the glory and the grandeur of the
British Empire.

Abuse and invective were not confined to Burke nor to the side which
Burke represented. Warren Hastings, or those who acted for Warren
Hastings, employed every means in their power to blacken the characters
of their opponents and to hold them up to public ridicule and to public
detestation. The times were not gentle times for men engaged in
political warfare, and the companions of Hastings employed all the arts
that the times placed at their disposal. Burke and Sheridan, and those
who acted with Burke and Sheridan, were savage enough in the tribune,
but they did not employ the extra-tribunal methods by which their enemy
retaliated upon them.

Hastings is scarcely to be blamed, considering duly the temper of his
age, for doing everything that party warfare permitted against his
opponents. He was fighting as for his life; he was fighting for what
was far dearer to him than life--for life, indeed, he had ever shown a
most soldierly disregard; he was fighting for an honorable name, for
the reward of a lifetime devoted to the interests of his country, as he
understood those interests; he was fighting for fame as against infamy,
and he fought hard and he {288} fought after the fashion of the time in
which he lived. The newspaper, the pamphlet, the lampoon, the
caricature, the acidulated satire, the envenomed epigram, all were
used, and used with success, against the promoters of the impeachment.

The caricatures were not all on one side, but the most numerous and the
most effective were in favor of the impeached statesman. If the
adversaries of Hastings naturally seized upon the opportunity of a
classical effect by presenting Burke and Hastings in the character of
Cicero and Verr