made of him by his friends. In replying to a letter asking him for a place in
the new government, he writes that his correspondent has been misinformed. "I
make no part of the ministerial arrangement," he writes, and adds, "Something in
the official line may be thought fit for my measure."

As a supporter of the coalition, Burke was one of the framers of the India Bill.
This was directed against the wholesale robbery and corruption which the East
India Company had been guilty of in its government of the country. Both Fox and
Burke defended the measure with all the force and power which a thorough mastery
of facts, a keen sense of the injustice done an unhappy people, and a splendid
rhetoric can give. But it was doomed from the first. The people at large were
indifferent, many had profitable business relations with the company, and the
king used his personal influence against it. The bill failed to pass, the
coalition was dismissed, and the party, which had in Burke its greatest
representative, was utterly ruined.

The failure of the India Bill marked a victory for the king, and it also
prepared the way for one of the most famous transactions of Burke's life.
Macaulay has told how impressive and magnificent was the scene at the trial of
Warren Hastings. There were political reasons for the impeachment, but the chief
motive that stirred Burke was far removed from this. He saw and understood the
real state of affairs in India. The mismanagement, the brutal methods, and the
crimes committed there in the name of the English government, moved him
profoundly, and when he rose before the magnificent audience at Westminster, for
opening the cause, he forced his hearers, by his own mighty passion, to see with
his own eyes, and to feel his own righteous anger. "When he came to his two
narratives," says Miss Burney, "when he related the particulars of those
dreadful murders, he interested, he engaged, he at last overpowered me; I felt
my cause lost. I could hardly keep my seat. My eyes dreaded a single glance
toward a man so accused as Mr. Hastings; I wanted to sink on the floor, that