themselves to their sovereign through the opinion of their country, and not by their obsequiousness to a favorite. Such men will serve their sovereign with affection and fidelity, because his choice of them, upon such principles, is a compliment to their virtue. They will be able to serve him effectually; because they will add the weight of the country to the force of the executory power. They will be able to serve their king with dignity, because they will never abuse his name to the gratification of their private spleen or avarice. This, with allowances for human frailty, may probably be the general character of a ministry which thinks itself accountable to the House of Commons when the House of Commons thinks itself accountable to its constituents. If other ideals should prevail, things must remain in their present confusion, until they are hurried into all the rage of civil violence, or until they sink into the dead repose of despotism.

IV

BURKE'S POWER AS AN ORATOR EXTRACTS FROM G. O. TREVELYAN'S GEORGE THE THIRD AND CHARLES FOX.

Before the year (1777) was out, full particulars of the catastrophe of Saratoga arrived in England. The history of Burgoyne's expedition was one long object lesson on the military value, and moral characteristics, of our Indian allies; and Burke chose an early opportunity for driving that lesson home to the conscience of Parliament. He spoke for more than three hours to a crowded and entranced assembly. Strangers, including of course the newspaper reporters, had been rigorously excluded from the Gallery; and, though Burke was urgently entreated to publish his speech, he could not find the leisure, nor perhaps the inclination, to rekindle in the solitude of his study that flame of rhetoric which had blazed up spontaneously under the genial influence of universal admiration, and all but universal sympathy. It was generally allowed that he had surpassed all his earlier performances. He left no aspect of the question untouched; he stated, in due sequence, every important argument; and, when he let his fancy loose, he traversed the whole scale of oratorical emotion, from the

depth of pathos to the height of unrestrained, audacious, and quite irresistible humor.

Burke began by laying the solid foundation for his case in a series of closely-reasoned passages of which only the outlines remain on record. These Indian tribes, he said, had in the course of years been so reduced in number and power that they were now only formidable from their cruelty, and to use them for warlike purposes was merely to be cruel ourselves in their persons. He called attention to the salient distinction between their employment "against armed and trained soldiers, embodied and encamped, and against unarmed and defenseless men, women, and children, dispersed in their several habitations" over the whole extent of a prosperous and industrious district. He attributed Burgoyne's defeat to the horror excited in the American mind by the prospect of an Indian invasion. The manly and resolute determination of the New England farmers to save their families and their homesteads from these barbarians led them "without regard to party, or to political principle, and in despite of military indisposition, to become soldiers, and to unite as one man in the common defense. Thus was the spectacle exhibited of a resistless army springing up in the woods and deserts." Indians, said Burke, were the most useless, and the most expensive, of all auxiliaries. Each of their so-called braves cost as much as five of the best European musketeers; and, after eating double rations so long as the provisions lasted, they kept out of sight on a day of battle, and deserted wholesale at the first appearance of ill-suc

cess. They were not less faithless than inefficacious. When Colonel St. Leger found himself in difficulties they turned their weapons, with insolent treachery, against their civilized comrades; and over a circuit of many miles around Burgoyne's camp they plundered, and butchered, and scalped with entire indifference to the sex, the age, and the political opinions of their victims. Burke told the story of a poor Scotch girl's murder, on the eve of her intended marriage to an officer of the King's troops, with an effect on the nerves of his audience which perhaps was never equalled except by his own description, during the trial of Warren Hastings, of the treatment inflicted by the Nabob Vizier on the Oude princesses. Many of his hearers were moved to tears—a spectacle which, in the British Parliament, is seen hardly once in a generation; and Governor Johnstone congratulated the Ministry that there were no strangers in the Gallery, because they would have been worked up to such a pitch of excitement that Lord North, and Lord George Germaine, must have run a serious risk from popular violence as soon as they emerged into the street from the sanctuary of the House of Commons.

And then Burke changed his note, and convulsed his audience by a parody of Burgoyne's address to the Indians. It was a passage which Horace Walpole, who had collected his knowledge of it in detached morsels from many sources, pronounced to be a chef-d'œuvre of wit, humor, and just satire. "I wish," he wrote, "I could give an idea of that superlative oration. How cold, how inadequate will be my fragment of a sketch

from second, third, and thousandth hands!" Burke related how the British general harangued a throng of warriors drawn from seventeen separate Indian nations, who, so far from understanding the Burgoynese dialect, could not even follow the meaning of a speech made in plain English; how he invited themby their reverence for the Christian religion, and their well-known, and well-considered, views on the right of taxation inherent in the Parliament at Westminsterto grasp their tomahawks, and rally round his Majesty's standard; and how he adjured them, "by the same divine and human laws," not to touch a hair on the head of man, woman, or child while living, though he was willing to deal with them for scalps of the dead, inasmuch as he was a nice and distinguished judge between the scalp taken from a dead person, and from the head of a person who had died of being scalped. "Let us illustrate this Christian exhortation, and Christian injunction," said Burke, "by a more familiar picture. Suppose the case of a riot on Tower Hill. What would the keeper of his Majesty's lions do? Would he not leave open the dens of the wild beasts and address them thus: 'My gentle lions, my humane bears, my tender-hearted hyenas, go forth against the seditious mob on your mission of repression and retribution; but I exhort you as you are Christians, and members of a civilized society, to take care not to hurt man, woman, or child.'" Burke, like Mr. Gladstone after him, was said to be deficient in humor; but a great orator depends for his lighter effects not on a store of prepared jests and epigrams, but