the hopes which Burke had cherished for a political
lifetime were irretrievably ruined.

The six years that followed the great rout of the orthodox Whigs were years
of repose for the country, but it was now that Burke engaged in the most
laborious and formidable enterprise of his life, the impeachment of Warren
Hastings for high crimes and misdemeanours in his government of India. His
interest in that country was of old date. It arose partly from the fact of
William Burke's residence there, partly from his friendship with Philip
Francis, but most of all, we suspect, from the effect which he observed
Indian influence to have in demoralizing the House of Commons. "Take my
advice for once in your life," Francis wrote to Shee; "lay aside 40,000
rupees for a seat in parliament: in this country that alone makes all the
difference between somebody and nobody." The relations, moreover, between
the East India Company and the government were of the most important kind,
and occupied Burke's closest attention from the beginning of the American
war down to his own India Bill and that of Pitt and Dundas. In February
1785 he delivered one of the most famous of all his speeches, that on the
nabob of Arcot's debts. The real point of this superb declamation was
Burke's conviction that ministers supported the claims of the fraudulent
creditors in order to secure the corrupt advantages of a sinister
parliamentary interest. His proceedings against Hastings had a deeper
spring. The story of Hastings's crimes, as Macaulay says, made the blood of
Burke boil in his veins. He had a native abhorrence of cruelty, of
injustice, of disorder, of oppression, of tyranny, and all these things in
all their degrees marked Hastings's course in India. They were, moreover,
concentrated in individual cases, which exercised Burke's passionate
imagination to its profoundest depths, and raised it to such a glow of
fiery intensity as has never been rivalled in our history. For it endured
for fourteen years, and was just as burning and as terrible when Hastings
was acquitted in 1795, as in the select committee of 1781 when Hastings's
enormities were first revealed. "If I were to call for a reward," wrote
Burke, "it would be for the services in which for fourteen years, without
intermission, I showed the most industry and had the least success, I mean
in the affairs of India; they are those on which I value myself the most;
most for the importance; most for the labo