There is nothing more noble in Burke’s career than his long attempt to mitigate the evils of Company rule in India.  Research may well have shown that in some details he pressed the case too far; yet nothing has so far come to light to cast doubt upon the principles he there maintained.  He was the first English statesman fully to understand the moral import of the problem of subject races; and if he did not make impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the future, at least he flung an eternal challenge to their malignant complacency.  He did not ask the abandonment of British dominion in India, though he may have doubted the wisdom of its conquest.  All that he insisted upon was this, that in imperial adventure the conquering race must abide by a moral code.  A lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white.  The European must respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he would be compelled by law to respect them in his own State.  “If we are not able,” he said, “to contrive some method of governing India well which will not of necessity become the means of governing Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for their eternal separation, but none for sacrificing the people of that country to our constitution.”  England must be in India for India’s benefit or not at all; political power and commercial monopoly such as the East India Company enjoyed could be had only insofar as they are instruments of right and not of violence.  The Company’s system was the antithesis of this.  “There is nothing,” he said in a magnificent passage, “before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting.”  Sympathy with the native, regard for his habits and wants, the Company’s servants failed to display.  “The English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for the excesses of their premature power.  The consequences of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight.  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.”  More than a century was to pass before the wisest of Burke’s interpreters attempted the translation of his maxims into statute.  But there has never, in any language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in imperial adventure.  “The situation of man,” said Burke, “is the preceptor of his duty.”  He saw how a nation might become corrupted by the spoils of other lands.  He knew that cruelty abroad is the parent of a later cruelty at home.  Men will complain of their wrongdoing in the remoter empire;