How they return home laden with spoil:  “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.”  How in India all the vices operate by which sudden fortune is acquired; while in England are often displayed by the same person the virtues which dispense hereditary wealth, so that “here the manufacturer and the 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 oppression and his oppressors.”

No degree of eloquence, however, could avail to repair faults alike in structure and in tactics.  The whole design was a masterpiece of hardihood, miscalculation, and mismanagement.  The combination of interests against the Bill was instant, and it was indeed formidable.  The great army of returned nabobs, of directors, of proprietors of East India stock, rose up in all its immense force.  Every member of every corporation that enjoyed privilege by charter, felt the attack on the Company as if it had been a blow directed against himself.  The general public had no particular passion for purity or good government, and the best portion of the public was disgusted with the Coalition.  The king saw his chance.  With politic audacity he put so strong a personal pressure on the peers, that they threw out the Bill (December 1783).  It was to no purpose that Fox compared the lords to the Janissaries of a Turkish Sultan, and the king’s letter to Temple, to the rescript in which Tiberius ordered the upright Sejanus to be destroyed.  Ministers were dismissed, the young Pitt was installed in their place, and the Whigs were ruined.  As a party, they had a few months of office after Pitt’s death, but they were excluded from power for half a century.

CHAPTER VI

BURKE AND HIS FRIENDS

Though Burke had, at a critical period of his life, definitely abandoned the career of letters, he never withdrew from close intimacy with the groups who still live for us in the pages of Boswell, as no other literary group in our history lives.  Goldsmith’s famous lines in Retaliation show how they all deplored that he should to party give up what was meant for mankind.  They often told one another that Edmund Burke was the man whose genius pointed him out as the triumphant champion of faith and sound philosophy against deism, atheism, and David Hume.  They loved to see him, as Goldsmith said, wind into his subject like a serpent.  Everybody felt at the Literary Club that he had no superior in knowledge, and in colloquial dialectics only one equal.  Garrick was there, and of all the names of the time he is the man whom one would perhaps most willingly have seen, because the gifts which threw not only