felt would have been a desolating famine, if this child of your old age-if America-with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent. Turning from the agricultural resources of the Colonies, consider the wealth which they have drawn from the sea by their fisheries. The spirit in which that enterprising employment has been exercised ought to raise your esteem and adıniration. Pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis' Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic Circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of Polar cold, that they are at the antipōdés, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the South. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their vic torious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gi gantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous

and firm sagacity of English enterprisc, ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people: a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

When I contemplate these things,-when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of a watchful and suspicious government, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection,-when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

DESPOTISM INCOMPATIBLE WITH RIGHTS, 1788.-Id.

My Lords, you have now heard the principles on which Mr. Hastings governs the part of Asia subjected to the British empire. Here he has declared his opinion, that he is a despotic prince; that he is to use arbitrary power; and, of course, all his acts are covered with that shield. "I know," says he, "the Constitu tion of Asia only from its practice." Will your Lordships submit to hear the corrupt practices of mankind made the principles of Government? He have arbitrary power! My Lords, the East India Company have

not arbitrary power to give him; the King has no at bitrary power to give him; your Lordships have not; nor the Commons; nor the whole Legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give. No man can lawfully govern himself according to his own will,-much less can one person be governed by the will of another. We are all born in subjection,-all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, pre-existent law, prior to all our devices, and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas and to all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir.

This great law does not arise from our convention: or compacts; on the contrary, it gives to our conventions and compacts all the force and sanction they can have; it does not arise from our vain institutions. Every good gift is of God; all power is of God;--and He who has given the power, and from whom alone it originates, will never suffer the exercise of it to be practised upon any less solid foundation than the power itself. If, then, all dominion of man over nian is the effect of the divine disposition, it is bound by the eternal laws of Him that gave it, with which no human authority can dispense; neither he that exercises it, nor even those who are subject to it; and, if they were mad enough to make an express compact, that should release their magistrate from his duty, and should de

clare their lives, liberties, and properties dependent upon, not rules and laws, but his mere capricious will, that covenant would be void.

Th arbitrary power is not to be had by conquest. Nor can ary sovereign have it by succession; for no man can succeed to fraud, rapine, and violence. Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are alike criminal; and there is no man but is bound to resist it to the best of his power, wherever it shall show its face to the world.

Law and arbitrary power are in eternal enmity. Name me a magistrate, and I will name property; name me power, and I will name protection. It is a contradiction in terms, it is blasphemy in religion, it is wickedness in politics, to say that any man can have arbitrary power. In every patent of office the duty is included. For what else does a magistrate exist? To suppose for power, is an absurdity in idea. Judges are guided and governed by the eternal laws of justice, to which we are all subject. We may bite our chains, if we will; but we shall be made to know ourselves, and be taught that man is born to be governed by law; and he that will substitute will in the place of it is an enemy to God..

IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS, 1788.-Id.

The unremitting energy of Burke's appeals, in the prosecution of Hastings, was a subject of wonder at the time, and is a lasting memorial of his zeal in what he believed an honest cause, for the admiration of posterity. Hastings himself has said of Burke's eloquence against him,-"For the first half hour, I looked up to the orator in a revery of wonder; and, during that time, I felt myself the most culpable man on earth." The trial of Warren Hastings commenced in Westminster Hall, Feb. 18, 1788. The whole process occupied ten years, from 1785 to 1795. On the 23d of April, 1796, Hastings was acquitted by a large majority of the Peers.

My Lords, I do not mean now to go further than just to remind your Lordships of this,-that Mr. Hastings' government was one whole system of oppression, of robbery of individuals, of spoliation of the public, and of supersession of the whole system of the English Government, in order to vest in the worst of the natives all the power that could possibly exist in any Govern ment; in order to defeat the ends which all govern ments ought, in common, to have in view. In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villany upon Warren Hastings, in this last moment of my application to you.

My Lords, what is it that we want here, to a great act of national justice? Do we want a cause, my Lords You have the cause of oppressed princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated Provinces, and of wasted Kingdoms.

Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was there so much iniquity ever laid to the charge of any ore? No, my Lords, you must not look to punish any