the incurable, blind, and, senseless, animosity, which the several country powers bear towards each other, rather than by open force. But the difference in favour of the first conquerors is this; the Asiatic conquerors very soon abated of their ferocity, because they made the conquered country their own. They rose or fell with the rise or fall of the territory they lived in. Fathers there deposited the hopes of their posterity, and children there beheld the monuments of their fathers. Here their lot was finally cast, and it is the natural wish of all, that their lot should not be cast in a bad land. Poverty, sterility, and desolation, are not a recreating prospect to the eye of man, and there are very few who can bear to grow old among the curses of a whole people. If their passion or their avarice drove the Tartar lords to acts of rapacity or tyranny, there was time enough, even in the short life of man, to bring round the ill effects of an abuse of power upon the power itself. If hoards were made by violence, and tyranny, they were still domestic hoards; and domestic profusion, or the rapine of a more powerful and prodigal hand, restored them to the people. With many disorders, and with few political checks upon power, nature had still fair play; the sources of acquisition were not dried up, and therefore the trade, the manufactures, and the commerce of the country flourished. Even avarice and usury itself, operated both for the preservation and the employment of national wealth. The husbandman and manufacturer paid heavy interest, but then they augmented the fund from whence they were again to borrow. Their resources were dearly bought, but they were sure, and the general stock of the community grew by the general effort.

But under the English government all this order is reversed. The Tartar invasion was mischievous; but it is our protection that destroys India. It was their enmity, but it is our friendship: our conquest there, after twenty years, is as crude as it was the first day. The

natives scarcely know what it is to see the grey head of an Englishman. Young men (boys almost) govern there without society, and without sympathy with the natives. They have no more social habits with the people, than if they still resided in England, nor indeed any species of intercourse but that which is necessary to making a sudden fortune with a view to a remote settlement, Animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another, wave after wave, and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India. With us are no retributory superstitions, by which a foundation of charity compensates, through ages, to the poor, for the rapine and injustice of a day. With us no pride erects stately monuments which repair the mischiefs which pride had produced, and which adorn a country out of its own spoils. Eng. land has erected no churches, no hospitals, no palaces, no schools. England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations, dug out no reservoirs. Every other conqueror of every other description has left some monument, either of state or beneficence, be hind him. Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by any thing better than the ouran outang, or the tiger.

There is nothing in the boys we send to India worse than the boys whom we are whipping at school, or that we see trailing a pike or bending over a desk at home. But as English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for remedy of the excesses of their premature power. The

consequences of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in England, and the cries of India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about in every breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing ocean. In India all the vices operate by which sudden fortune is acquired; in England are often displayed, by the same persons, the virtues which dispense hereditary wealth. Arrived in England, the destroyers of the nobility and gentry of a whole kingdom, will find the best company in this nation, at a board of elegance and hospitality. Here the manufacturer and husbandman will bless the just and punctual hand, that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasant of Bengal, or wrung from him the very opium in which he forgot his oppressions, and his oppressor. They marry into your families, they enter into your senate, they ease your estates by loans, they raise their value by demand, they cherish and protect your relations which lie heavy on your patronage; and there is scarcely a house in the kingdom that does not feel some concern and interest, that makes all reform of our eastern government appear officious and disgusting, and on the whole a most discouraging attempt. In such an attempt you hurt those who are able to return kindness or to resent injury. If you succeed, you save those who cannot so much as give you thanks. these things shew the difficulty of the work we have on hand: but they shew its necessity too. Our Indian government is in its best state a grievance; it is necessary that the correctives should be uncommonly vigorous, and the work of men sanguine, warm, and even impassioned in the cause. But it is an arduous thing to plead against abuses of a power which originates from our own country, and affects those whom we are used to consider as strangers.

All

WILLIAM PITT,

(Son of the late Earl of Chatham,)

Was born in 1759. He was educated at Cambridge. He entered at Lincoln's-Inn, and was called to the bar, where he had not much practice. He was just returned to parliament for the borough of Appleby. The following is the first speech he made in the house, on economical reform. He became chancellor of the exchequer in 1783, which office he continued till 1801. He then retired but came in again in 1804, and continued in that office till his death January 1806.

He began with declaring, that when a subject of so much importance was under discussion in that house, he thought it the duty of every member of parliament to speak his sentiments upon it; that his constituents might be able to form a judgment how far he was likely to prove a faithful representative, and whether he avowed himself a true friend to the liberties of the people, or meant to uphold the influence of the crown, in its present increased and dangerous extent. He observed, that he perfectly approved of a sentiment which had been thrown out, by a gentleman who opposed the bill, that such a plan of economy as that proposed by the bill should have originated with the crown itself. It ought to have come from his majesty's ministers. It would have come with more grace, it would have come with more benefit to the public service, if it had sprung from the royal breast. His majesty's ministers ought

to have come forward, and proposed a reduction in the civil list, and thereby given the people the consolation of knowing, that their sovereign participated in the suf ferings of the empire, and presented an honourable example of retrenchment in an hour of general difficulty. They ought to have consulted the glory of their royal master, and seated him in the hearts of his people, by abating from magnificence what was due to necessity. Instead of waiting for the slow request of a burthened people, they should have courted popularity by a voluntary surrender of useless revenue. Far more agreeable would it have been to that house to accede, than to propose; much more pleasing to have observed the free exercise of royal bounty, than to make the appeal, and point out what was right, or what was necessary. But if the ministry failed to do this; if they interfered between the benignity of the sovereign and the distresses of his people, and stopped the tide of royal sympathy, was that a reason why the house of commons, his majesty's public counsellors, should desist from a measure so congenial to the paternal feelings of the sovereign, so applicable to the wants and distresses of the people? The natural beneficence of the royal heart would be gratified by the seasonable remittance; and it was surely no reason, that because the ministry failed to do their duty, the house should cease to attend to theirs. It had been agreed on all hands, that the burthens under which the people groaned, burthens that were more likely to be increased than diminished, were of a degree of pressure that was scarcely tolerable; and that every man, who pointed out a practical mode of relief, would deserve well of his country. The bill now before the house met this idea completely; its effect would be salutary; its operation easy. What was it that it aimed at ? Not the taking from the crown any one necessary part of its expence; not the abridg ment of what was useful, or what was honourable; not the smallest degradation of its glory; but a mere cur VOL. II.

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