confess to you who know me," said he, "that my confusion was extreme at finding myself led into conversation with an avowed assassin. I instantly ordered him te leave me. Our laws do not allow me to detain him, but I shall take care to have him landed at a sea-port as remote as possible from France." A reply was sent from Bonaparte, saying, among other things, "I recognize here the principles, honor, and virtue of Mr. Fox. Thank him on my part." In connection with this reply, Talleyrand stated, that the Emperor was ready to negotiate for a peace, "on the basis of the treaty of Amiens." Communications were accordingly opened on the subject, but at this important crisis Mr. Fox's health began to fail him. He had been taken ill some months before in consequence of exposure at the funeral of Lord Nelson, and his physicians now insisted that he should abstain for a time from all public duties. In July the disease was found to be dropsy of the chest, and, after lingering for three months, he died at the house of the Duke of Devonshire, at Chiswick, on the 13th of September, 1806. He was buried with the highest honors of the nation in Westminster Abbey, his grave being directly adjoining the grave of Lord Chatham, and close to that of his illustrious rival, William Pitt. Mr. Fox was the most completely English of all the orators in our language Lord Chatham was formed on the classic model-the express union of force, majesty, and grace. He stood raised above his audience, and launched the bolts of his eloquence like the Apollo Belvidere, with the proud consciousness of irresistible might. Mr. Fox stood on the floor of the House like a Norfolkshire farmer in the midst of his fellows short, thick-set, with his broad shoulders and capacious chest, his bushy hair and eyebrows, and his dark countenance working with emotion, the very image of blunt honesty and strength. His understanding was all English-plain, practical, of prodigious force-always directed to definite ends and objects, under the absolute control of sound common sense. He had that historical cast of mind by which the great English jurists and statesmen have been so generally distinguished. Facts were the staple of his thoughts; all the force of his intellect was exerted on the actual and the positive. He was the most practical speaker of the most practical nation on earth. His heart was English. There is a depth and tenderness of feeling in the na tional character, which is all the greater in a strong mind, because custom requires it to be repressed. In private life no one was more guarded in this respect thar Mr. Fox; he was the last man to be concerned in getting up a scene. But when he stood before an audience, he poured out his feelings with all the simplicity of a child I have seen his countenance," says Mr. Godwin, "lighten up with more than mortal ardor and goodness; I have been present when his voice was suffocated with tears." In all this, his powerful understanding went out the whole length of his emotions, so that there was nothing strained or unnatural in his most vehement bursts of passion. "His feeling," says Coleridge, "was all intellect, and his intellect was all feeling." Never was there a finer summing up; it shows us at a glance the whole secret of his power. To this he added the most perfect sincerity and artlessness of manner. His very faults conspired to heighten the conviction of his honesty. His broken sentences, the choking of his voice, his ungainly gestures, his sudden starts of passion, the absolute scream with which he delivered his vehement passages, all showed him to be deeply moved and in earnest, so that it may be doubted whether a more perfect delivery would not have weakened the impression he made. Sir James Mackintosh has remarked, that "Fox was the most Demosthenean speaker since Demosthenes," while Lord Brougham says, in commenting on this pas sage, “There never was a greater mistake than the fancying a close resemblance be tween his eloquence and that of Demosthenes." When two such men differ on a point like this, we may safely say that both are in the right and in the wrong. As to cel tain qualities, Fox was the very reverse of the great Athenian; as to others, they had much in common. In whatever relates to the forms of oratory-symmetry, dig nity, grace, the working up of thought and language to their most perfect expression -Mr. Fox was not only inferior to Demosthenes, but wholly unlike him, having no rhetoric and no ideality; while, at the same time, in the structure of his understand ing, the modes of its operation, the soul and spirit which breathes throughout his elo quence, there was a striking resemblance. This will appear as we dwell for a mo ment on his leading peculiaritics. (1.) He had a luminous simplicity, which gave his speeches the most absolute unity of impression, however irregular might be their arrangement. No man ever kept the great points of his case more steadily and vividly before the minds of his audience. (2.) He took every thing in the concrete. If he discussed principles, it was always in direct connection with the subject before him. Usually, however, he did not even discuss a subject-he grappled with an antagonist. Nothing gives such life and interest to a speech, or so delights an audience, as a direct contest of man with man (3.) He struck instantly at the heart of his subject. He was eager to meet his opponent at once on the real points at issue; and the moment of his greatest power was when he stated the argument against himself, with more force than his adversary or any other man could give it, and then seized it with the hand of a giant, tore it in pieces, and trampled it under foot. (4.) His mode of enforcing a subject on the minds of his audience was to come back again and again to the strong points of his case. Mr. Pitt amplified when he wished to impress, Mr. Fox repeated. Demosthenes also repeated, but he had more adroitness in varying the mode of doing it. Idem haud iisdem verbis." (5.) He had rarely any preconceived method or arrangement of his thoughts. This was one of his greatest faults, in which he differed most from the Athenian artist. If it had not been for the unity of impression and feeling mentioned above, his trength would have been wasted in disconnected efforts. (6.) Reasoning was his forte and his passion. But he was not a regular reasoner. In his eagerness to press forward, he threw away every thing he could part with, and compacted the rest into a single mass. Facts, principles, analogies, were all wrought together like the strands of a cable, and intermingled with wit, ridicule, or impassioned feeling. His arguments were usually personal in their nature, ad hominem, &c., and were brought home to his antagonist with stinging severity and force. (7.) He abounded in hits—those abrupt and startling turns of thought which rouse an audience, and give them more delight than the loftiest strains of eloquence. (8.) He was equally distinguished for his side blows, for keen and pungent remarks flashed out upon his antagonist in passing, as he pressed on with his argument. (9.) He was often dramatic, personating the character of his opponents or others, and carrying on a dialogue between them, which added greatly to the liveliness and force of his oratory. (10.) He had astonishing dexterity in evading difficulties, and turning to his own advantage every thing that occurred in debate. In nearly all these qualities he had a close resemblance to Demosthenes. In his language, Mr. Fox studied simplicity, strength, and boldness. "Give me an elegant Latin and a homely Saxon word," said he, "and I will always choose the latter." Another of his sayings was this: "Did the speech read well when reported? If so, it was a bad one." These two remarks give us the secret of his style as an orator. The life of Mr. Fox has this lesson for young men, that early habits of recklessness and vice can hardly fail to destroy the influence of the most splendid abilities and the most humane and generous dispositions. The agh thirty-eight years in public life, he was in office only eighteen months SPEECH OF MR. FOX ON THE BILL FOR VESTING THE AFFAIRS OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY IN THE HANDS OF CERTAIN COMMISSIONERS, FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE PROPRIETORS AND TEL PUBLIC, DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, DECEMBER 1, 1783. INTRODUCTION. THE reader is already acquainted with the leading provisions of this bill, which were stated in the introduction to Mr. Burke's speech on the same subject. It was intended to place all the concerns of the East India Company in the hands of the British government. It abolished the courts of Directors and Proprietors, and divided the duties of the former between two distinct Boards. The first, having the entire government of India, civil and military, with the appointment and removal of officers, was to consist of seven Commissioners or Directors, to be chosen first by Parliament, and afterward by the Crown, and removable only in consequence of an address to the King from one of the Houses of Parliament. The other, having the management of the Company's commercial concerns, was to consist of nine Assistant Directors, appointed in the first instance by Parliament, and afterward by a major vote of the proprietors at an open poll. The bill was to remain in force four years, until after the next general election; and was accompanied by another, containing a variety of excellent regulations for the remova of abuses in India. The debate was long and vehement. Burke had delivered his splendid speech of four hours in length pouring forth a flood of information on the subject of India, such as no other man in England could hav communicated. Dundas had attacked the bill with all his acuteness, and his perfect acquaintance with Indian affairs. Mr. Pitt had followed, denouncing it as a violation of chartered rights, designed to create an "imperium in imperio," which would place Mr. Fox above the King's control, and promising to bring forward another proposal "which would answer all the exigencies of the case without the violence and danger of this measure." It was at the end of such a debate, after two o'clock in the morning, that Mr. Fox rose to speak; and probably not a man in the kingdom but himself could have obtained a hearing under such circumstances, much less have commanded the fixed attention of the House for nearly three hours longer, as he did in this speech. As he spoke in reply, his object was not so much to dwell on the positive side of the argument, which he had already done at the second reading of the bill, as to obviate objections, to turn back the reasoning of his antagonists upon themselves, and especially to relieve his character from the odium which rested upon it in consequence of his coalition with Lord North. As a specimen of uncommon dexterity in this respect, and of bold, indignant retort upon his antagonists, it has a high order of merit. SPEECH, &c. SIR. The necessity of my saying something upon the present occasion is so obvious to the House, that no apology will, I hope, be expect ed from me in troubling them even at so late an hour. I shall not enter much into a detail, or minute defense of the particulars of the bill before you, because few particular objections have been made. The opposition to it consists only in general reasonings, some of little application, and others totally aside from the point in ques tion. The bill has been combated through its past stages upon various principles; but, to the present moment, the House has not heard it canvassed upon its own intrinsic merits. The debate to-night has turned chiefly upon two points, namely, violation of charter, and increase of influence; and upon both these points I shall say a few words. The honorable gentleman, who opened the debate [Mr. Powis], first demands my attention; 1 Two o'clock in the morning. Connertima with the caus of liberty. not, indeed, for the wisdom of the observations The honorable gentleman charges me with abandoning that cause, which, he says in terms of flattery, I had once so successfully asserted. I tell him, in reply, that if he were to search the history of my life, he would find that the period of it in which I struggled most for the real, substantial cause of liberty is this very moment tha I am addressing you. Freedom, according to my conception of it, consists in the safe and sa cred possession of a man's property, governed by laws defined and certain; with many person al privileges, natural, civil, and religious, which he can not surrender without ruin to himself, | cover the inheritance of family maxims when and of which to be deprived by any other power they question the principles of the Revolution: is despotism. This bill, instead of subverting, but I have no scruple in subscribing to the artı is destined to stabilitate these principles; instead cles of that creed which produced it Sover of narrowing the basis of freedom, it tends to eigns are sacred, and reverence is due to every calarge it; instead of suppressing, its object is king; yet, with all my attachments to the person infuse and circulate the spirit of liberty. of a first magistrate, had I lived in the reign of What is the most odious species of tyranny? James the Second, I should most certainly have Precisely that which this bill is meant to anni- contributed my efforts, and borne part in those nate. That a handful of men, free themselves, illustrious struggles which vindicated an empire should exercise the most base and abominable from hereditary servitude, and recorded this val despotism over millions of their fellow-creatures; uable doctrine, that trust abused is revocable. that innocence should be the victim of oppression; that industry should toil for rapine; that the harmless laborer should sweat, not for his own benefit, but for the luxury and rapacity of tyrannic depredation; in a word, that thirty millions of men, gifted by Providence with the ordinary endowments of humanity, should groan under a system of despotism, unmatched in all the histories of the world ?2 What is the end of all government? Certainly the happiness of the governed. Others may hold different opinions; but this is mine, and I proclaim it. What, then, are we to think of a government, whose good fortune is supposed to spring from the calamities of its subjects, whose aggrandizement grows out of the miseries of mankind? This is the kind of government exercised under the East India Company upon the natives of Hindostan; and the subversion of that infamous government 's the main object of the bill in question. Violation I. But in the progress of accomplishing this end, it is objected that the charter of the Comfcharter pany should not be violated; and upon stilled. this point, sir, I shall deliver my opinion without disguise. A charter is a trust to one or more persons for some given benefit. If this trust be abused, if the benefit be not obtained, and that its failure arises from palpable guilt, or (what in this case is full as bad) from palpable ignorance or mismanagement, will any man gravely say that the trust should not be resumed and delivered to other hands ?-more especially in the case of the East India Company, whose manner of executing this trust, whose laxity and languor produced, and tend to produce consequences diametrically opposite to the ends of confiding that trust, and of the institution for which it was granted? I beg of gentlemen to be aware of the lengths to which their arguments upon the intangibility of this charter may be carried. Every syllable virtually impeaches the establishment by which we sit in this House, in the enjoyment of this freedom, and of every other blessing of our government. Arguments of this kind are batteries against the main pillar of the British Constitution. Some men are consistent with their own private opinions, and dis We have here one of Mr. Fox's peculiarities on which much of his force depends, viz., terse and tapid enumeration-the crowding of many particu. lars into one striking mass of thought. His enumerations, however, are not made like those of most men, for rhetorical effect; they are condensed arguments, as will be seen by analyzing this passage. No man will tell me that a trust to a compa ny of merchants stands upon the solemn and sanctified ground by which a trust is committed to a monarch; I am, therefore, at a loss to reconcile the conduct of men who approve that re sumption of violated trust, which rescued and re-established our unparalleled and admirable Constitution with a thousand valuable improvements and advantages at the Revolution, and who, at this moment, rise up the champions of the East India Company's charter.* although the incapacity and incompetence of that Company to a due and adequate discharge of the trust deposited in them by that charter are themes of ridicule and contempt to all the world; and although, in consequence of their mismanagement, connivance, and imbecility, combined with the wickedness of their servants, the very name of an Englishman is detested, even to a proverb, throughout all Asia, and the national character is become degraded and dishonored. To rescue that name from odium, and redeem this character from disgrace, are some of the objects of the present bill; and gentlemen should, indeed, gravely weigh their opposition to a measure, which, with a thousand other points not less valuable, aims at the attainment of these objects. Those who condemn the present bill as a violation of the chartered rights of the East India Company, condemn, on the same ground, I say again, the Revolution as a violation of the chartered rights of King James II." He, with as much reason, might have claimed the property 3 Johnson decides the question in the same way with Mr. Fox, in his Taxation no Tyranny. "A char. ter is a grant of certain powers or privileges giv en to a part of the community for the advantage of change or to revocation. Every act of government the whole; and is therefore liable, by its nature, to aims at public good. A charter, which experience has shown to be detrimental to the nation, is to be repealed; because general prosperity must always be preferred to particular interest. If a charter be used to evil purposes, it is forfeited, as the weapon is taken away which is injuriously employed." Here is another characteristic of Mr. Fox, that of turning defense into attack. The reader of Demosthenes will remember how uniformly the same thing is done by the great Athenian orator. 5 Mr. Fox gives us, thus early, one of those repe titions by which he was so much accustomed to en force his reasonings. The statement, however, is finely varied by an expansion of the argument, and enlivened by that dramatic mode of presenting the thought, in which he so much delighted. of dominion. But what was the language of the | any that can be imputed to this bill; and de people?"No, you have no property in domin- posits in one man an arbitrary power over mili ion. Dominion was vested in you, as it is in ev- ions, not in England, where the evil of this cor. ery chief magistrate, for the benefit of the com- rupt ministry could not be felt, but in the East munity to be governed. It was a sacred trust, Indies, the scene of every mischief, fraud, and delegated by compact. You have abused the violence. The learned gentleman's bill afford. trust; you have exercised dominion for the pur- ed the most extensive latitude for malversation; poses of vexation and tyranny-not of comfort, the bill before you guards against it with all protection, and good order, and we therefore re-imaginable precaution. Every line in both the sume the power which was originally ours. We bills, which I have had the honor to introduce, recur to the first principles of all government, presumes the possibility of bad administration, the will of the many; and it is our will that for every word breathes suspicion. This bill you shall no longer abuse your dominion." The supposes that men are but men. It confides in case is the same with the East India Company's no integrity; it trusts no character; it incul government over a territory, as it has been said cates the wisdom of a jealousy of power, and by Mr. Burke, of two hundred and eighty thou- annexes responsibility, not only to every action sand square miles in extent, nearly equal to all but even to the inaction of those who are to Christian Europe, and containing thirty millions dispense it. The necessity of these provisions of the human race. It matters not whether do- must be evident, when it is known that the dif minion arises from conquest or from compact. ferent misfortunes of the Company have resultConquest gives no right to the conqueror to be ed not more from what the servants did, than a tyrant; and it is no violation of right to abol- from what the masters did not. ish the authority which is misused. To the probable effects of the learned gentle. man's bill and this, I beg to call the attention of the House. Allowing, for argument's sake, to the Governor General of India, under the first-named bill [Mr. Dundas'], the most unlim II. Having said so much upon the general Objections matter of the bill, I must beg leave to answered. make a few observations upon the remarks of particular gentlemen; and first of the learned gentleman over against me [Mr. Dun-ited and superior abilities, with soundness of das]. The learned gentleman has made a long, heart, and integrity the most unquestionable. and, as he always does, an able speech; yet, what good consequences could be reasonably translated into plain English, and disrobed of expected from his extraordinary, extravagant. the dextrous ambiguity in which it has been and unconstitutional power, under the tenure by enveloped, to what does it amount? To an es- which he held it? Were his projects the most tablishment of the principles upon which this bill enlarged, his systems the most wise and excel was founded, and an indirect confession of its lent which human skill could devise; what fa necessity. He allows the frangibility of char- hopes could be entertained of their eventual suc ters, when absolute occasion requires it; and cess, when, perhaps, before he could enter upon admits that the charter of the Company should the execution of any measure, he may be renot prevent the adoption of a proper plan for the called in consequence of one of those changes future government of India, if a proper plan can in the administrations of this country, which have be achieved upon no other terms. The first been so frequent for a few years, and which of these admissions seems agreeable to the civil some good men wish to see every year? Exmaxims of the learned gentleman's life, so far actly the same reasons which banish all rational as a maxim can be traced in a political charac- hope of benefit from an Indian administration ter so various and flexible; and to deny the under the bill of the learned gentleman, justify second of these concessions was impossible even the duration of the proposed commission. I for the learned gentleman, with a staring reason the dispensers of the plan of governing India (a upon your table to confront him if he attempt-place from which the answer of a letter can not ed it. The learned gentleman's bill, and the bill before you, are grounded upon the same bottom, of abuse of trast, maladministration, debility, and incapacity in the Company and their servBut the difference in the remedy is this: the learned gentleman's bill opens a door to an influence a hundred times more dangerous than A side blow of this kind, in passing, is peculiar ly characteristic of Mr. Fox. ants. 7 Mr. Dundas, as a member of the Shelburne minis. try, had brought in a bill on the subject about seven months before. This gave the Governor General of Bengal a controlling power over the other two presidencies; and authorized him, when he saw fit, to act on his own responsibility, in opposition to the opinion of his own council. His bill also created a new Secretary of State for Indian affairs, with ample powers resembling, to a considerable extent, those of Mr Fox's commissioners. be expected in less than twelve months) have not greater stability in their situations than a British ministry, adieu to all hopes of rendering our Eastern territories of any real advantage to this country; adieu to every expectation of purging or purifying the Indian system, of reform, of improvement, of reviving confidence, of regulating the trade upon its proper principles, of ing tranquillity, of re-establishing the in comfort, and of securing the perpetu. ity of these blessings by the cordial reconcile. ment of the Indians with their former tyrants upon fixed terms of amity, friendship, and fel lowship. I will leave the House and the king. dom to judge which is best calculated to accom plish those salutary ends; the bill of the learn ed gentleman, which leaves all to the discretion of one man, or the bill before you. which de |