eeds of our agents in India was at once to strike the minister who
had dexterously secured their support, and to attack one of the great
strongholds of parliamentary corruption. The proceedings against
Hastings were, in the first instance, regarded as a sequel to the
struggle over Fox's East India Bill. That these considerations were
present in Burke's thought there is no doubt, but they were purely
secondary. It was India itself that stood above all else in his
imagination. It had filled his mind and absorbed his time while Pitt
was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, and Burke was looking forward
to match his plan of economic reform with a greater plan of Indian
reform. In the Ninth Report, the Eleventh Report, and in his speech
on the India Bill of 1783, he had shown both how thoroughly he had
mastered the facts, and how profoundly they had stirred his sense of
wrong. The masterpiece known as the speech on the Nabob of Arcot's
debts, delivered in Parliament on a motion for papers (1785), handles
matters of account, of interest turned into principal, and principal
superadded to principal; it deals with a hundred minute technicalities
of teeps and tuncaws, of gomastahs and soucaring; all with such a
suffusion of interest and colour, with such nobility of idea and
expression, as could only have come from the addition to genius of a
deep morality of nature, and an overwhelming force of conviction. A
space less than one of these pages contains such a picture of the
devastation of the Carnatic by Hyder Ali, as may fill the young orator
or the young writer with the same emotions of enthusiasm, emulation,
and despair that torment the artist who first gazes on the Madonna
at Dresden, or the figures of Night and Dawn and the Penseroso at
Florence. The despair is only too well founded. No conscious study
could pierce the secret of that just and pathetic transition from the
havoc of Hyder Ali to the healing duties of a virtuous government, to
the consolatory celebration of the mysteries of justice and humanity,
to the warning to the unlawful creditors to silence their inauspicious
tongues in presence of the holy work of restoration, to the generous
proclamation against them that in every country the first creditor is
the plough. The emotions which make the hidden force of such pictures
come not by observation. They grow from the sedulous meditation of
long years, directed by a powerful intellect and inspired by an
interest in hu