around me; to try to save the Constitution; or if not to save the Constitution, at least to save our characters, and remove from our graves the foul disgrace of standing apart while a deadly blow is aimed at the independence of our country.

The right honorable gentleman says I fled from the country after exciting rebellion, and that I have returned to raise another. No such thing. The charge is false. The civil war had not commenced when I left the kingdom; and I could not have returned without taking a part. On one side there was the camp of the rebel; on the other, the camp of the minister, a greater traitor than that rebel. The stronghold of the Constitution was nowhere to be found. I agree that the rebel who rose against the government should have suffered; but I missed on the scaffold the right honorable gentleman. Two desperate parties were in arms against the Constitution. The right honorable gentleman belonged to one of those parties and deserved death. I could not join the rebel; I could not join the government; I could not join torture; I could not join half-hanging; I could not join free quarter; I could take part with neither. I was therefore absent from a scene where I could not be active without self-reproach, nor indifferent with safety.

Many honorable gentlemen thought differently from me; I respect their opinions, but I keep my own; and I think now, as I thought then,

that the treason of the minister against the liberties of the people was infinitely worse than the rebellion of the people against the minister.

I have returned, not as the right honorable member has said, to raise another storm; I have returned to discharge an honorable debt of gratitude to my country, that conferred a great reward for past services, which, I am proud to say, was not greater than my desert. I have returned to protect that Constitution, of which I was the parent and founder, from the assassination of such men as the honorable gentleman and his unworthy associates. They are corrupt; they are seditious; and they, at this very moment, are in a conspiracy against their country. I have returned to refute a libel as false as it is malicious, given to the public under the appellation of a report of a committee of the lords. Here I stand ready for impeachment or trial; I dare accusation. I defy the honorable gentleman; I defy the government; I defy their whole phalanx; let them come forth. I tell the ministers I will neither give them quarter nor take it. I am here to lay the shattered remains of my Constitution on the floor of this House in defense of the liberties of my country.

SHERIDAN

AT THE TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS1 (1788)

Born in 1751, died in 1816; settled in London in 1773; Proprietor of Drury Lane Theater in 1776; entered Parliament in 1780; Secretary of the Treasury in 1783; Treasurer of the Navy in 1806; left Parliament in 1812; author of "The School for Scandal,” 1777.

IF a stranger had at this time [in 1782] gone into the kingdom of Oude, ignorant of what had happened since the death of Sujah Dowlah-that man who with a savage heart had still great lines of character, and who with all his ferocity in war, had still with a cultivating hand preserved to his country the riches which it derived from benignant skies, and a prolific soil-if this stranger, ignorant of all that had happened in the short interval, and observing the wide and general devastation, and all the horrors of the scene of plains unclothed and brown-of vegetation burnt up and extinguished-of villages

1 From Sheridan's speech as delivered before Parliament sitting as a High Court in Westminster Hall, on June 3, 6, 10 and 13, in 1788, when as much as fifty pounds was known to be paid for a seat. When Sheridan had spoken the final word, "My lords, I have done," he was caught by Burke in his arms and "hugged with the energy of generous admiration." So says Macaulay, but Macaulay represents that Sheridan "contrived with a knowledge of stage effect which his father might have envied, to sink back, as if exhausted, into the arms of Burke." Only one of Sheridan's speeches has been preserved in anything approaching an adequate report.

depopulated and in ruin-of temples unroofed and perishing-of reservoirs broken down and dry-he would naturally inquire, What war had thus laid waste the fertile fields of this once beautiful and opulent country? What civil dissensions have happened thus to tear asunder, and separate the happy societies that once possessed those villages? What religious rage had, with unholy violence, demolished those temples, and disturbed fervent, but unobtruding piety in the exercise of its duties? What merciless enemy had thus spread the horrors of fire and sword? What severe visitation of Providence had thus dried up the mountains, and taken from the face of the earth every vestige of green?—or rather, what monsters had crawled over the country, tainting and poisoning what the voracious appetite could not devour? To such questions, what must be the answer? No wars have ravaged these lands and depopulated these villages-no civil discords have been felt-no religious rage-no merciless enemy-no affliction of Providence which, while it scourged for the moment, cut off the sources of resuscitation-no voracious and poisoning monsters-no; all this has been accomplished by the friendship, generosity, and kindness of the English nation. They had embraced us with their protecting arms-and, lo, these are the fruits of their alliance.

There is nothing, my lords, to be found in the history of human turpitude; nothing in the nervous delineations and penetrating brevity of

1

Tacitus; nothing in the luminous and luxuriant pages of Gibbon, or of any other historian, dead or living, who, searching into measures and characters with the rigor of truth, presents to our abhorrence depravity in its blackest shapes, which can equal, in the grossness of the guilt, or in the hardness of heart with which it was conducted, or in low and groveling motives, the acts and character of the prisoner. It was he who, in the base desire of stripping two helpless women, could stir the son to rise up in vengeance against them; who, when that son had certain touches of nature in his breast, certain feelings of an awakened conscience, could accuse him of entertaining peevish objections to the plunder and sacrifice of his mother; who, having finally divested him of all thought, all reflection, all memory, all conscience, all tenderness and duty as a son, all dignity as a monarch; having destroyed his character, and depopulated his country, at length brought him to violate the dearest ties of nature, in countenancing the destruction of his parents.

This crime, I say, has no parallel or prototype in the Old World or the New, from the day of original sin to the present hour. The victims of his oppression were confessedly destitute of all power to resist their oppressors. But their

This graceful tribute to Gibbon who was present to hear it, has suffered somewhat from a fiction that represents Sheridan as say. ing afterward that he meant "voluminous" instead of "luminous." Moore, Sheridan's biographer, is said to be responsible for the fiction.