A History of English Literature

usual reformer's reward. Though he soon made himself 'the brains of the
Whig party,' which at times nothing but his energy and ability held
together, and though in consequence he was retained in Parliament virtually
to the end of his life, he was never appointed to any office except that of
Paymaster of the Forces, which he accepted after he had himself had the
annual salary reduced from L25,000 to L4,000, and which he held for only a
year.
During all the early part of his public career Burke steadily fought
against the attempts of the King and his Tory clique to entrench themselves
within the citadel of irresponsible government. At one time also he largely
devoted his efforts to a partly successful attack on the wastefulness and
corruption of the government; and his generous effort to secure just
treatment of Ireland and the Catholics was pushed so far as to result in
the loss of his seat as member of Parliament from Bristol. But the
permanent interest of his thirty years of political life consists chiefly
in his share in the three great questions, roughly successive in time, of
what may be called England's foreign policy, namely the treatment of the
English colonies in America, the treatment of the native population of the
English empire in India, and the attitude of England toward the French
Revolution. In dealing with the first two of these questions Burke spoke
with noble ardor for liberty and the rights of man, which he felt the
English government to be disregarding. Equally notable with his zeal for
justice, however, was his intellectual mastery of the facts. Before he
attempted to discuss either subject he had devoted to it many years of the
most painstaking study--in the case of India no less than fourteen years;
and his speeches, long and highly complicated, were filled with minute
details and exact statistics, which his magnificent memory enabled him to
deliver without notes.
His most important discussions of American affairs are the 'Speech on
American Taxation' (1774), the 'Speech on Conciliation with America'
(1775), both delivered in Parliament while the controversy was bitter but
before war had actually broken out, and 'A Letter to the Sheriffs of
Bristol' (1777). Burke's plea was that although England had a theoretical
constitutional right to tax the colonies it was impracticable to do so
against their will, that the attempt was therefore useless and must lead to
disaster, that measures of conciliation instead of force should be
employed, and that the attempt to override the liberties of Englishmen in
America, those liberties on which the greatness of England was founded,
would establish a dangerous precedent for a similar course of action in the
mother country itself. In the fulfilment of his prophecies which followed
the rejection of his argument Burke was too good a patriot to take
satisfaction.
In his efforts in behalf of India Burke again met with apparent defeat, but
in this case he virtually secured the results at which he had aimed. During
the seventeenth century the English East India Company, originally
organized for trade, had acquired possessions in India, which, in the
middle of the eighteenth century and later, the genius of Clive and Warren
Hastings had increased and consolidated into a great empire. The work which
these men had done was rough work and it could not be accomplished by
scrupulous methods; under their rule, as before, there had been much
irregularity and corruption, and part of the native population had suffered
much injustice and misery. Burke and other men saw the corruption and
misery without realizing the excuses for it and on the return of Hastings
to England in 1786 they secured his impeachment. For nine years Burke,
Sheridan, and Fox conducted the prosecution, vying with one another in
brilliant speeches, and Burke especially distinguished himself by the