exclaimed the latter, "ought indeed to be impartial; but it is new to question the zeal of a prosecutor." Burke, feminine in his affections and aversions, condescended to entreaty, and wrote to Dundas asking as a favour to himself that he should not be mutilated of his right hand. But the renegade was reckless, and Pitt was obdurate; there was nothing for it, therefore, but to stifle the glowing rage of Francis with splendid flattery. Burke in the name of the managers wrote him a letter-such a letter! It was dated from the committee-room of the House of Commons; it declared in the name of the managers that he was indispensable to the achievement of national justice; and it adjured him not to forsake in their last resort the afflicted people of Asia, over whom he had so long "exercised paternal care." Junius could not refuse; and in his capacity of assessor, throughout the protracted and arduous proceedings, he was never wanting by the side of his illustrious friend. Among the managers were Fox, Sheridan, Grey, Erskine, Windham, Anstruther, Elliott, and Burgoyne.

After many postponements, the day at length arrived. It was sixty-three years since the Peers had assembled as a court of justice for the trial of Lord Macclesfield. They were then much more limited in number. To the roll-call of the Lord High Steward upwards of two hundred peers. now answered to their names, and proceeded from their own House to Westminster Hall, which had been furnished as a court for the occasion. The Heir-apparent and other princes of the blood, many of the chief dignitaries of the realm, and its most brilliant lights of literature and art, were there assembled. The Duchess of Devonshire was surrounded by the great Whig ladies, who glanced encouragement on Fox and Grey and Windham in the managers' box. The ladies whose sympathy was Ministerial occupied

seats near the Duchess of Rutland; and every nook and cranny of the Hall was early filled by some more or less distinguished listener to the unusual and almost unbelievable arraignment. Of all the notabilities of the day, Pitt alone was absent; not even once did he afterwards condescend to show himself during the trial. The great Proconsul was conducted to the bar, and in compliance with old usage, was told to drop upon his knees. The indignity sent a sharper pang to his proud heart than the enumeration of all the crimes laid to his charge. It was but momentary. The Lord High Steward bade him rise and be seated; and there throughout the day, and for days to come that seemed innumerable, the tiny, pallid, plainly attired, but dignified and intrepid culprit, sat observing calmly the features of his judges, watching keenly every movement of his pursuers, and now and then conferring with Plumer, Law, and others of his counsel. It was a strange sight; and to us, looking back at it historically, it seems as strange as it did then. It was a signal experiment in the way of exacting accountability, made with consummate skill, earnestness, and persistency, in a case where there was unprecedented need. Fitness in the tribunal only was wanting; but that want was irremediable. A court of peers had aforetime sat as judges and as jurors to try the guilt or innocence of one accused of native treason, domestic violence, or breach of municipal law, the incidents of which were recent, and the proofs capable of being fairly weighed during the sunlight of an ordinary day. But here was an appeal from medieval Asia to modern Europe, from unintelligible Paganism to so-called Christianity, from the helplessness of the conquered to the privileges of constitutional freedom, from unnumbered millions of sufferers to two hundred listless men of fashion-some old and gouty,

others giddy and gambling, a few painstaking and conscientious, and a few more benevolent and well meaning, but phlegmatic, hypochondriacal, and too easily bored. Estimated by the capacity derived from experience, there never was an Areopagus more helpless; for precedent to guide them there was literally none. Estimated by any theoretical standard, the constitution of such a court was simply absurd. Of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal who actually heard Hastings arraigned, but twenty-nine voted him, seven years afterwards, innocent or guilty. The power of impeachment had been a valuable power, and had done good work in its time; but work like this it was never meant to do, and work like this it was wholly incapable of doing as it ought to be done. Through the grey winter-fog of February 1788, these truths, clear to us now, were not, however, discernible; and, upon the whole, it may be doubted whether men would ever have been brought unanimously or even generally to accept them, had not the great experiment been elaborately tried under circumstances so favourable to success, as that which characterised the case of Warren Hastings. The delusive belief in a phantom can only be dispelled by affording every one repeated and continuous opportunities of seeing that the resuscitated form cannot be grasped, or held, or made to speak coherently and accountably. Until the faith in phantoms be exploded, we cannot hope to get to realities. A learned, wise, exalted, and catholic-hearted court of appeal for those who suffer wrong within the confines of the empire is indispensable to the maintenance of the empire in equity and honour; indispensable, indeed, to its permanent existence; but the Lord High Steward's court, convened to try a colonial Viceroy on a writ of impeachment, is utterly unlike what such a court should be. It was necessary, therefore, that the obsolete

M

pageant should be once more reproduced, were it only to prove how ill adapted it was for the modern purpose required. And in this historical point of view it may not be waste of time to note some of the particulars wherein it egregiously failed..

The arbitrament of political controversies between equal and independent nations is sufficiently difficult under the most favourable circumstances, for the obvious reason that it is of necessity extremely hard to constitute a court capable at once of appreciating the just claims of both sides, and of rising superior to the passionate and partial importunities of either. But immeasurably more difficult is the task of arbitrating between suzerain and vassal, the aggressor and the aggrieved, the lord paramount of conquest and his brow-beaten if not beggared subjects. Whether the dispute lie between a distant and comparatively diminutive community on the one hand, and the contumelious power of centralism on the other, or whether the question be one raised on the part of deposed or mediatised princes and the exchequer of an imperial dynasty, there is need of the greatest care in selecting the judges, and of the greatest precaution against the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the conscious or r conscious interposition of personal, party, and national predilections. It is a matter of daily observation how men, who, as jurors in a common lawsuit, would stare contemptuously at any attempt to tamper with their independence, betray no conscientious scruple, and affect no sting of shame, at being importuned, threatened, and talked over, when they have votes to give as peers or commoners, electors or elect, on questions involving quite as certainly and clearly the character of individuals or the interests of the public. This is so even when the controversies are between fellow-subjects or neighbours; how

much more when the complainants are strangers, aliens, it may be recent foes, or doubtful allies, whose reputation has been hardly dealt with, and whose means of correcting misimpression are practically nil; while the respondent in the political suit stands upon the presumption of national honour, and appeals to all the interests and feelings interwoven with national pride. It is hard even for a moment to set the balances fair, but it is useless and hopeless to try and do so, if there be no staid, learned, responsible, and, above all, jealously limited number of arbiters, in whose hands the scales are to be held. From the days of the Ecclesia of Athens and the Senate of Rome, to those of the Convention Parliament and the National Assembly of France, there has never been a practically indeterminate assembly, elective or hereditary, which has not signally failed whenever it undertook to perform judicial duties. It would seem as if there were in the very nature of the thing a fault ineradicable. Apart from the multiplied chances which a multitudinous jury presents, that part of the case may be heard by one set of men and part by another, neither of whom, therefore, can properly join in giving judgment, though both are empowered to do so; there is the still more fatal characteristic of all such assemblies, that they are necessarily constituted of materials egregiously unequal in their intellectual abilities, that they are palpably for the most part untrained for such work, and that they are invariably prone to evade or repudiate openly the individual responsibility of forming and expressing a decision, because that decision may not be decisive. It is idle to answer that logically this is unreasonable and unsound. The fact that in such cases men are not governed by logic is too plain; and equally plain is the fact that a supreme court of appeal, whether it be composed of