summate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown the ripe fruit of our noon-day; then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, TOUSSAINT L'Ouverture. Wendell Phillips.

IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS

My 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 were mad enough to make an express compact that should release their magistrate from his duty, and should declare their lives, liberties, and properties dependent upon, not rules and laws, but his mere capricious will, that covenant would be void.

This arbitrary power is not to be had by conquest. Nor can any sovereign have it by succession; for no man can succeed to fraud, rapine, and violence. Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are alike criminal; and there is no man but is bound to resist it to the best of his power, wherever it shall show its face to the world.

Law and arbitrary power are in eternal enmity. Name me a magistrate, and I will name property; name me power, and I will name protection. It is a contradiction in terms; it is blasphemy in religion, it is wickedness in politics, to say that any man can have arbitrary power. In every patent of office the duty is included. For what else does a magistrate exist? To suppose for power, is an absurdity in idea. Judges are guided and governed by the eternal laws of justice, to which we are all subject. We may bite our chains, if we will; but we shall be made to know ourselves, and be taught that man is born to be governed by law; and he that will substitute will in the place of it, is an enemy to God.

My Lords, I do not mean to go further than just to remind your Lordships of this,- that Mr. Hastings's government was one whole system of oppression, of robbery of individuals, of spoliation of the public, and of supersession of the whole system of the English government, in order to vest in the worst of the natives all the power that could possibly exist in any government; in order to defeat the ends which all governments ought, in common, to have in view. In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villainy upon Warren Hastings, in this last moment of my application to you.

Therefore, it is with confidence that, ordered by the Commons of Great Britain, I impeach Warren Hastings of high crimes and misdemeanors.

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has abused. I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonored.

I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted.

I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose property he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.

I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes. And I impeach him in the name and by the virtue of those eternal laws of justice, which ought equally to pervade every age, condition, rank, and situation, in the world.

Edmund Burke.

CHARACTER OF WASHINGTON

There are but three individuals upon whom mankind, with some approach to general consent, have bestowed the epithet of the Great." Shall we compare our Washington for a moment with each of them? Shall we compare him with Peter the Great of Russia, who flourished in the beginning of the century, and hewed that political colossus of the North into form and symmetry? A sovereign of vast, though often most ill-directed energy; a fearless, and, on some occasions, a beneficent reformer; a consummate organizer, who, with a kind of rough tact, truly felt the pulses of national life in the Titanic frame which he called into being; pursuing a few grand ideas, though often by eccentric methods bordering on madness, but with a resolution which no labors could weary and no dangers appall, and forcing them with an iron will upon an unsympathizing and apathetic people. These are his titles to the epithet of "Great"; but with them all he was an unmitigated tyrant, the murderer, perhaps the torturer, of his own son; a man who united the wisdom of a philosopher and the policy of a great prince with the tastes of a satyr, the manners of a barbarian, and the passions of a fiend; guilty of crimes so hideous and revolting, that if I attempted to describe them I should drive you shrieking from this hall. You surely would not permit me to place the name of Washington in comparison with his.

Or shall we compare him with Frederick the Second of Prussia, to whom complacent public opinion has also accorded the epithet of "Great"? He was no doubt a military and a civil

genius of the first order; by the energy of his character he built up a kingdom scarcely known by that title when he came to the throne, into a first-rate power; the fearless soldier, the profound strategist, the heroic chief; nor less a master of political combination, a zealous promoter of the material prosperity of his subjects, who doubled the population of his little kingdom, and increased all the resources in more than the same proportion, notwithstanding the wars in which he was continually involved; but at the same time a pedant, ostentatious, of superficial literary attainments, a wretched poetaster, a dupe of the insipid adulation of godless foreign wits, who flattered him to his face and ridiculed him behind his back; a German sovereign who yet preferred to write and speak poor broken French, in which Voltaire said there was not a sentence which you would not know to be the language of a foreigner; a prince raised by Providence in the bitter school of adversity to an absolute throne, entertaining the most exalted ideas of the kingly prerogative, drawing everything, even the administration of justice, into an arbitrary centralization, who had yet trained his undevout heart to believe that blind chance or blind destiny occupies the throne of the universe; that the heavens and the earth could do without a God, though the paltry electorate of Brandenburgh could not do without a king; and that while it was impossible for him to hold the scattered provinces of his little realm together without a daily outgoing of civil, military and judicial power, moved by one intellect and one will, could yet believe that the systems and systems which compose the universe, beyond the power of human speech to enumerate, or human thought to conceive, are thrown out into one vast anarchy, wheeling and hurtling through the regions of space without a lawgiver and a head; who, so thinking and so believing while he lived, when he came to die, in order to mark more emphatically his contempt for the species to which he belonged, instead of allowing his "poor old carcass," as he himself called it, to be laid by the side of his kindred, ordered that it should be buried with his favorite dogs at Potsdam!

Or shall we compare Washington with the third greatness of his age, the illustrious captain of the last generation in France; that portentous blazing star which began to flame in the eastern sky as our benignant luminary was sinking in the west, amidst the golden clouds of a nation's blessings? I have no wish to

trample on the memory of Napoleon the First, whom I regard by no means as the most ambitious of conquerors, the most arbitrary of despots, or the worst of men. The virtues and the feelings, like the talents, the opportunities, and the fortunes of this extraordinary man, are on too colossal a scale to be measured by ordinary standards of morality. The prevalent opinions in this country of his character and career have come to us through a British medium, discolored by a national prejudice and the deadly struggle of a generation; or by natural reaction have been founded on the panegyrics of grateful adherents and admiring subjects, who deem every Frenchman a partner in the glory of their chief. Posterity and impartial history will subdue the lights and relieve the shadows of the picture. They will accord to him a high, perhaps the highest, rank among the great masters of war, placing his name upon an equality with the three great captains of antiquity, if not above them; will point to his code as a noble monument of legislative wisdom; will dwell upon the creative vigor with which he brought order out of the chaos of the Revolution, retrieving the dilapidated finances and restoring the prostrate industry of France; will enumerate the harbors, the canals, the bridges, the public buildings, the Alpine roads, the libraries, the museums, and all the thousand works of industrious peace and productive art; will not withhold their admiration for the giant grasp of his genius and the imperial grandeur of his fortunes, nor deny a tribute of human sympathy to his calamitous decline and fall; - but the same impartial history will record more than one ineffaceable stain upon his character, and never, to the end of time, never on the page of historian, poet or philosopher; never till a taste for true moral greatness is eaten out of the hearts of men by a mean admiration of success and power; never in the exhortations of the prudent magistrate counseling his fellow-citizens for their good; never in the dark ages of national fortune, when anxious patriots explore the annals of the past for examples of public virtue; never in the admonition of the parent forming the minds of his children by lessons of fireside wisdom; never, O never, will the name of Napoleon, nor of any of the other of the famous conquerors of ancient and modern days, be placed upon a level with Washington's.

And while we on the 22d of February celebrate with solemn and joyous rites the great anniversary of our Washington, our