them probably do not believe now, that it had
any solid foundation in incontrovertible facts. It did not "fit in" to
their ordinary modes of thought; and it has never been ranked with
Burke's "organized" orations; it has never come home to what Bacon
called the "business and bosoms" of his countrymen. They have generally
dismissed it from their imaginations as "a phantasmagoria and a hideous
dream" created by Burke under the impulse of the intense hatred he felt
for the administration which succeeded the overthrow of the government,
which was founded on the coalition of Fox and North.

Now, in simple truth, the speech is the most masterly statement of
facts, relating to the oppression of millions of the people of India,
which was ever forced on the attention of the House of Commons,--a
legislative assembly which, it may be incidentally remarked, was
practically responsible for the just government of the immense Indian
empire of Great Britain. It is curious that the main facts on which the
argument of Burke rests have been confirmed by James Mill, the
coldest-blooded historian that ever narrated the enormous crimes which
attended the rise and progress of the British power in Hindostan, and a
man who also had a strong intellectual antipathy to the mind of Burke.
In making the speech, Burke had documentary evidence of a large portion
of the transactions he denounced, and had _divined_ the rest. Mill
supports him both as regards the facts of which Burke had positive
knowledge, and the facts which he deductively inferred from the facts he
knew. Having thus a strong foundation for his argument, he exerted every
faculty of his mind, and every impulse of his moral sentiment and moral
passion, to overwhelm the leading members of the administration of Pitt,
by attempting to make them accomplices in crimes which would disgrace
even slave-traders on the Guinea coast. The merely intellectual force of
his reasoning is crushing; his analysis seems to be sharpened by his
hatred; and there is no device of contempt, scorn, derision, and direct
personal attack, which he does not unsparingly use. In the midst of all
this mental tumult, inestimable maxims of moral and political wisdom are
shot forth in short sentences, which have so much of the sting and
brilliancy of epigram, that at first we do not appreciate their depth of
thought; and through all there burns such a pitiless fierceness of moral
reprobation of cruelty, injustice, and wrong