other such délinquent from India. Warren Hastings has not left substance enough in India to nourish such another delinquent.

My Lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have before you the Commons of Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe, my Lords, that the sun, in his bene ficent progress round the world, does not behold a more glorious sight than that of men, separated from a remote people by the material bounds and barriers of na ture, united by the bond of a social and moral community; all the Commons of England resenting, as their own, the indignities and cruelties that are offered to all the people of India.

Do we want a tribunal? My Lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us with a tribunal like this. We commit safely the interests of India and humanity into your hands. Therefore, it is with confidence that, ordered by the Commons,

I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors.

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose Parliamentary trust he has betrayed.

I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dis honored.

I impeach him in the name of the people in India, whose laws, rights, and liberties, he has subverted; whose properties he has destroyed; whose country he has laid waste and desolate.

I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.

I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condi tion of life.

PERORATION AGAINST WARREN HASTINGS.-Edmund Burke.

My Lords, at this awful close, in the name of the Commons, and surrounded by them, I attest the retiring, I attest the advancing generations, between which, as a link in the great chain of eternal order, we stand.

We call this Nation, we call the world to witness, that the Commons have shrunk from no labor; that we have been guilty of no prevarication, that we have made no compromise with crime; that we have not feared any odium whatsoever, in the long warfare which we have carried on with the crimes, with the vices, with the exorbitant wealth, with the enormous and overpowering influence of Eastern corruption.

My Lords, it has pleased Providence to place us in such a state that we appear every moment to be upon the verge of some great mutations. There is one thing, and one thing only, which defies all mutation: that which existed before the world, and will survive the fabric of the world itself,-I mean justice; that justice which, emanating from the Divinity, has a place in the breast of every one of us, given us for our guide with regard to ourselves and with regard to others, and

which will stand, after this globe is burned to ashes, our advocate or our accuser, before the great Judge, when He comes to call upon us for the tenor of a wellspent life.

My Lords, the Commons will share in every fate with your Lordships; there is nothing sinister which can happen to you, in which we shall not all be involved; and, if it should so happen that we shall be subjected to some of those frightful changes which we have seen, -if it should happen that your Lordships, stripped of all the decorous distinctions of human society, should, by hands at once base and cruel, be led to those scaffolds and machines of murder upon which great kings and glorious queens have shed their blood, amidst the prelates, amidst the nobles, amidst the magistrates, who supported their thrones,-may you in those moments feel that consolation which I am persuaded they felt in the critical moments of their dreadful agony!

My Lords, if you must fall, may you so fall! but, if you stand, and stand I trust you will,-together with the fortune of this ancient monarchy, together with the ancient laws and liberties of this great and illustrious Kingdom, may you stand as unimpeached in honor as in power; may you stand, not as a substitute for virtue, but as an ornament of virtue, as a security for virtue; may you stand long, and long stand the terror of tyrants; may you stand the refuge of afflicted Nations; may you stand a sacred temple, for the perpetual resi dence of an inviolable justice!

SATIRE ON THE PENSION SYSTEM, 1786.- Curran.

John Philpot Curran was born in Newcastle, Ireland, July 24th, 1750. "There never lived a greater advocate," says Charles Phillips; "certainly never one more suited to the country in which his lot was cast. His eloquence was copious, rapid, and ornate, and his powers of mimicry beyond all description." In his boyhood he had a confusion in his utterance, from which he was called by his schoolfellows "stuttering Jack Curran." He employed every means to correct his elocution, and render it perfect. "He accustomed himself," says one of his biographers, “to speak very slowly, to correct his precipitate utterance. He practised before a glass, to make his gestures graceful. He spoke aloud the most celebrated orations. One piece, the speech of Antony over the dead body of Cæsar,he was never weary of repeating. This he recommended to his young friends at the bar, as a model of eloquence. And while he thus used art to smooth a channel for his thoughts to flow in, no man's eloquence ever issued more freshly and spontaneously from the heart. It was always the heart of the man that spoke." Curran died October 14th, 1817.

This polyglot of wealth, this museum of curiosities, the Pension List, embraces every link in the human chain, every description of men, women, and children, from the exalted excellence of a Hawke or a Rodney, to the debased situation of the lady who humbleth herself that she may be exalted. But the lessons it inculcates form its greatest perfection: It teacheth, that Sloth and Vice may eat that bread which Virtue and Honesty may starve for after they have earned it. It teaches the idle and dissolute to look up for that support which they are too proud to stoop and earn. It directs the minds of men to an entire reliance on the ruling Power of the State, who feeds the ravens of the Royal aviary, that cry continually for food. It teaches

them to imitate those Saints on the Pension List, that are like the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet are arrayed like Solomon in his glory. In fine, it teaches a lesson, which, indeed, they might have learned from Epictetus, that it is sometimes good not to be over-virtuous; it shows, that, in propor tion as our distresses increase, the munificence of the Crown increases also; in proportion as our clothes are rent, the royal mantle is extended over us.

Notwithstanding that the Pension List, like charity, covers a multitude of sins, give me leave to consider it as cong home to the members of this House ;-give me leave to say, that the Crown, in extending its charity, its liberality, its profusion, is laying a foundation for the independence of Parliament; for, hereafter, instead of orators or patriots accounting for their couduct to such mean and unworthy persons as freeholders, they will learn to despise them, and look to the first man in the State; and they will, by so doing, have this security for their independence,—that while any man in the Kingdom has a shilling, they will not want one!

REPLY TO THREATS OF VIOLENCE, 1790.-Curran.

We have been told this night, in express words, that the man who dares to do his duty to his country in this House may expect to be attacked without these wal's by the military gentlemen of the Castle. If the army had been directly or indirectly mentioned in the course of the debate, this extraordinary declaration might be 14*