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barbarous measure has been defended, not only on the principles of policy and necessity, but also those of morality; " for it is perfectly allowable," says Lord Suffolk, "to use all the means which God and nature have put into our hands." I am astonished, I am shocked, to hear such principles confessed; to hear them avowed in this House; or in this country. My Lords, I did not intend to encroach upon so much of your attention, but I cannot repress my indignation - I feel myself impelled to speak. My Lords, we are called upon as members of this House, as men, as Christians to protest against such horrible barbarity!" That God and Nature have put into our hands!" What ideas of God and nature that noble Lord may entertain, I know not; but I know that such detestable principles are equally abhorrent to religion and humanity. What! to attribute the sacred sanction of God and nature to the massacres of the Indian scalping-knife! —to the cannibal savage, torturing, murdering, devouring, drinking the blood of his mangled victims! Such notions shock every precept of morality, every feeling of humanity, every sentiment of honor. These abominable principles, and this more abominable avowal of them, demand the most decisive indignation!

PANEGYRIC ON WILLIAM OF ORANGE

WILLIAM C. PLUNKET

Baron William Conyngham Plunket was born in Ireland in 1764. As a lawyer, he was considered the leader of the Dublin bar at its golden age; as an advocate, he was comparable with Erskine; as a statesman, he ranked among the foremost of his age; as an orator, he has not been surpassed by any of his contemporaries. "His oratory," says a writer in the "Edinburgh Review," "was of a very high kind; in perfect mastery of the topics he touched; in fulness and accuracy of information; in reasoning, not rapid and vehement, but earnest, vigorous, and sustained; in the dignity and propriety of its diction, and in the occasional beauty of its illustrations it has not been excelled in the British Senate." He died in 1854.

P

ERHAPS, my Lords, there is not to be found

in the annals of history a character more truly great than that of William the Third. Perhaps no person has ever appeared on the theatre of the world, who has conferred more essential or more lasting benefits on mankind; on these countries certainly none. When I look at the abstract merits of his character, I contemplate him with admiration and reverence. Lord of a petty principality; destitute of all resources but those with which nature had endowed him; regarded with jealousy and envy by those whose battles he fought; thwarted in all his counsels; embarrassed in all his movements; deserted in his most critical enter

prise; he continued to mould all those discordant materials, to govern all those warring interests, and merely by the force of his genius, the ascendancy of his integrity, and the unmovable firmness and constancy of his nature, to combine them into an indissoluble alliance against the schemes of despotism and universal domination of the most powerful monarch in Europe, seconded by the ablest generals, at the head of the bravest and best disciplined armies in the world, and wielding, without check or control, the unlimited resources of his empire. He was not a consummate general: military men will point out his errors; in that respect fortune did not favor him, save by throwing the lustre of adversity over all his virtues. He sustained defeat after defeat, but always rose adversa verum immersabilis unda. Looking merely at his shining qualities and achievements, I admire him as I do a Scipio, a Regulus, a Fabius; a model of tranquil courage, undeviating probity, and armed with a resoluteness and constancy in the cause of truth and freedom, which rendered him superior to the accidents that control the fate of ordinary

men.

IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS

EDMUND BURKE

Edmund Burke, one of the greatest masters of composition of modern times, was born in Dublin, Ireland, January 12, 1729, and died in Bath, England, July 8, 1797. His renown as an orator rests on his written and not his spoken words, as his delivery was faulty and his voice not of a pleasing quality. His compositions, however, are masterpieces, and although at times his sentences are long and somewhat involved, his reasoning is plain, his language chaste and expressive, and his argument convincing. He influenced not only his time, but the generations following him.

MY

Y 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 Constitution 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 arbitrary 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 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 conventions 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 practiced upon any less solid foundation than the power itself. If then all dominion of man over man, 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

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