ities he
invoked and in which he believed, not to chastise and humiliate, but to
guide and inspire.

In recapitulating the services by which Edmund Burke will ultimately be
judged, I would say that he had a hand in almost every movement for
which his generation is applauded. He gave an impulse to almost every
political discussion which afterwards resulted in beneficent reform.
Some call him a croaker, without sympathy for the ideas on which modern
progress is based; but he was really one of the great reformers of his
day. He lifted up his voice against the slave-trade; he encouraged and
lauded the labors of Howard; he supported the just claims of the
Catholics; he attempted, though a churchman, to remove the restrictions
to which dissenters were subjected; he opposed the cruel laws against
insolvent debtors; he sought to soften the asperities of the Penal Code;
he labored to abolish the custom of enlisting soldiers for life; he
attempted to subvert the dangerous powers exercised by judges in
criminal prosecutions for libel; he sought financial reform in various
departments of the State; he would have abolished many useless offices
in the government; he fearlessly exposed the wrongs of the East India
Company; he tried to bring to justice the greatest political criminal of
the day; he took the right side of American difficulties, and advocated
a policy which would have secured for half a century longer the
allegiance of the American colonies, and prevented the division of the
British empire; he advocated measures which saved England, possibly,
from French subjugation; he threw the rays of his genius over all
political discussions; and he left treatises which from his day to ours
have proved a mine of political and moral wisdom, for all whose aim or
business it has been to study the principles of law or government.
These, truly, were services for which any country should be grateful,
and which should justly place Edmund Burke on the list of great
benefactors. These constitute a legacy of which all nations should
be proud.

AUTHORITIES.

Works and Correspondence of Edmund Burke; Life and Times of Edmund
Burke, by Macknight (the ablest and fullest yet written); An Historical
Study, by Morley (very able); Lives of Burke by Croly, Prior, and
Bisset; Grenville Papers; Parliamentary History; the Encyclopaedia
Britannica has a full article on Burke; Massey's History of England;
Chatham's Correspondence; Moore's Life of Sherid