which was originally ours; we recur to the first principles of all government-the will of the many; and it is our will that you shall no longer abuse your dominion." The case is the same with the East India Company's government over a territory, as it has been said by my honorable friend (Mr. Burke), of two hundred and eighty thousand square miles in extent, nearly equal to all Christian Europe, and containing thirty millions of the human race. It matters not whether dominion arise from conquest or from compact. Conquest gives no right to the conqueror to be a tyrant; and it is no violation of right to abolish the authority which is misused.

LIBERTY IS STRENGTH AND ORDER

[Fox, a supporter of the French Revolution, uttered in 1797 the following vigorous words in advocacy of liberty.]

Liberty is order! Liberty is strength! Look round the world and admire, as you must, the instructive spectacle. You will see that liberty not only is power and order, but that it is power and order predominant and invincible, that it derides all other sources of strength. And shall the preposterous imagination be fostered that men bred in liberty-the first of human kind who asserted the glorious distinction of forming for themselves their social compact-can be condemned to silence upon their rights? Is it to be conceived that men who have enjoyed, for such a length of days, the light and happiness of freedom, can be restrained and shut up again in the gloom of ignorance and degradation? As well, sir, might you try, by a miserable dam, to shut up the flowing of a rapid river. The rolling and impetuous tide would burst through every impediment that man might throw in its way; and the only consequence of the impotent would be, that, having collected new force by its temporary suspension, in forcing itself through new channels, it would spread devastation and ruin on every side. The progress of liberty is like the progress of the stream. Kept within its bounds, it is sure to fertilize the country through which it runs; but no power can arrest it in its passage; and shortsighted, as well as wicked, must be the heart of the projector that would strive to divert its course.

LORD BROUGHAM

Lord Brougham, a distinguished orator of England in the 19th Century, advocated the Cause of Popular Education and Reform and opposition to the Slave Trade.

LORD THOMAS ERSKINE (1750-1823)

THE CELEBRATED FORENSIC ORATOR

I

N 1774, Thomas Erskine, son of the Scottish Earl of Buchan, happened to enter the court presided over by the famous Lord Mansfield, and was invited by him to sit by his side. He listened to the trial with the result that, convinced that he could easily surpass any speech he had heard, he resolved to adopt the law as his profession. Leaving the fashionable world of London, where his charming social powers had made him a marked success, he entered Lincoln's Inn as a student, and was called to the bar in 1778. In his first case, in which his client was on trial for libel on the Earl of Sandwich, a member of the Cabinet, Erskine showed such remarkable powers as to astonish all his hearers, and to bring himself at a bound into the highest rank of his profession.

Erskine subsequently entered Parliament, but political debate was not to his taste, and he failed to make any high mark in the House of Commons. In the legal arena, however, his success continued, high authorities looking upon him as unequalled, either in ancient or modern times, as an advocate in the forum. In the defence of right against might he was one of the most conspicuous examples in English history. He was the successful defender of Lord George Gordon, of Thomas Paine, of Stockdale, of John Horne Tooke, and of others who had dared to defend the rights of the people against the acts of the great. He became Lord Chancellor in 1806, and was raised to the peerage as Baron Erskine, retiring from office in 1807.

THE GOVERNING OF INDIA

[Burke's articles of impeachment against Warren Hastings, were published and widely spread in advance of their delivery before the House of Lords, and prejudiced the case against the defendant. This unfair act of the House of Commons was

486

LORD THOMAS ERSKINÉ

sharply criticised in a pamphlet published by the Rev. Mr. Logan. The author was put on trial for libel, and engaged Erskine to defend him. Erskine's speech at this trial, from which we give a select passage, was one of the ablest and most eloquent displays of his powers of oratory.]

It may and must be true that Mr. Hastings has repeatedly offended against the rights and privileges of Asiatic government, if he was the faithful deputy of a power which could not maintain itself for an hour without trampling upon both. He may and must have offended against the laws of God and nature if he was the faithful viceroy of an empire wrested in blood from the people to whom God and nature had given it. He may and must have preserved that unjust dominion over timorous and abject nations by a terrifying, overbearing, insulting superiority, if he was the faithful administrator of your Government, which, having no root in consent or affection, no foundation in similarity of interest, nor support from any one principle which cements men together in society, could only be upheld by alternate stratagem and force. The unhappy people of India, feeble and effeminate as they are from the softness of their climate, and subdued and broken as they have been by the knavery and strength of civilization, still occasionally start up with all the vigor and intelligence of insulted nature. To be governed at all, they must be governed with a rod of iron; and our empire in the Eastern World long since must have been lost to Great Britain, if civil skill and military prowess had not united their efforts to support an authority which Heaven never gave, by means which it never can sanction.

Gentlemen, I think I can observe that you are touched with this way of considering the subject, and I can account for it. I have not been considering it through the old medium of books, but have been speaking of man and his nature, and of human dominion, from what I have seen of them myself amongst reluctant nations submitting to our authority. I know what they feel, and how such feelings can alone be repressed. I have heard them in my youth from a naked savage, in the indignant character of a prince, surrounded by his subjects, addressing the governor of a British colony, holding a bundle of sticks in his hand as the notes of his unlettered eloquence. "Who is it?" said the jealous ruler over the desert, encroached upon by the restless foot of English adventure; "who is it that causes this river to rise in the high mountains and to empty itself in the ocean? Who is it that causes to blow the loud winds of winter, and that calms them again in the summer? Who is it that rears up the shade of those lofty forests, and blasts them with the quick lightning at his pleasure? The same Being who gave to you a country on the other side of the waters, and gave ours to us; and by this title we will