his part, was an Englishman depraved, fit and ready not only to enslave himself, but to enslave others. It was natural, he observed, for men in power to feel an inclination to exercise that power tyrannically, and even to the enslaving of those subordinate to their authority; but it was the province of freemen to detect them; and when the freedom of Englishmen in India was taken from them, those in power there might with impunity carry into execution against the miserable natives whatever plans of slavery their arbitrary and unfeeling dispositions might suggest.

The amendment was agreed to.

March 19.

THIS day Mr. Dempster moved for leave to bring in a bill to explain and amend the East India Judicature Acts. He contended, that as trial by jury was the birth-right of every British subject, no man, no assembly, had any right to take away such privilege, unless by the consent, and on the application of the parties themselves; and he declared it to be no justification whatever for that House to assert, that it gave the parties so disfranchised a better thing in lieu of that which they took away. He reprobated the ground of necessity as a plea for the abolition of trial by jury in the case in question, and asserted, that no such necessity could be proved to have existed. After the motion had been supported by Mr. Francis, and opposed by the solicitor-general, principally on the ground, that a common jury, composed of common individuals, were not competent to decide upon cases of delinquency in India, likely to arise in future,

Mr. BURKE declared, that he entertained a profound respect for the information which the honourable and learned gentleman had it in his power to give, and he felt that great weight was due to his opinion. He could not, however, but observe, that poor, ignorant, unlettered laymen, like himself, had not, lately at least, derived any assistance from the honourable and learned gentleman in

conducting the important prosecution in which they had been for some time engaged, and that the House had not paid any very great deference to the advice and judgment of the honourable and learned gentleman, when he had declared himself adverse to their proceedings against Mr. Hastings. Mr. Burke animadverted on the solicitor-general's declaration, that a common jury, composed of common individuals, were not competent to decide upon cases of délinquency in India, likely to arise in future. He said, that much as he respected that House, he could not conceive, that the instant any man entered the doors of it, he became, as it were, gifted with a degree of knowledge and a fund of liberality superior to that possessed by people without doors. He hoped, that generally speaking, that House represented the understandings as well as the individuals of the mass of the people, and that there was nothing so distinguished in the intellects of members of parliament, as to mark them out from their constituents, as the only proper persons to be trusted with the reputation and property of those who might hereafter be brought to trial for any part of their conduct in India.

The honourable and learned gentleman, whom, from what he had said, he should hold himself entitled to consider as the author of the act of 1786, had rested the justification of the bill on experience, and not on the loose ground of speculation and experiment. That was undoubtedly the true ground for any great measure to stand upon; but he should examine a little how far the experience referred to would warrant the inferences which the honourable and learned gentleman had drawn from it. With regard, then, to the trials alluded to by the honourable and learned gentleman that between the Armenians and Governor Verelst, and that in the case of the seizure of Lord Pigot- they rather, in his mind, proved the competency of juries to try East India causes than any thing else. In the former, large damages had been given: but then, perhaps, as the honourable and learned gentleman had

petent, and had mistaken the merits of the case. The judge also might have been equally mistaken in his declaration to the jury. Supposing that, however, to have been the fact, where would the honourable and learned gentleman look for competency to decide? Under the new bill, men surely not more competent than a judge sitting in his own court in Westminster-hall, were to form the tribunal. Let the honourable and learned gentleman recollect, however, that if there really was any ground to complain of an improper decision in the cause of the Armenians and Governor Verelst, that cause was a civil action for damages, and all civil actions for damages were left exactly where they were before, by the existing act of 1786. The whole of the argument, therefore, which could be drawn out of the cause of Governor Verelst, fell to the ground, and was perfectly inapplicable, as a justification of the new judicature. With regard to the other cause mentioned by the honourable and learned gentleman, that in respect to Lord Pigot, it was clearly a criminal case, but he had never heard the verdict complained of. The public had, indeed, complained of the judgment, and that on the ground of the inadequate fine levied. As the honourable and learned gentleman had thought proper to infer, that the jury were half asleep before the trial was brought to a conclusion, he (Mr. Burke) trusted that it would not be straining the point too violently to suppose that the act of 1786 had now a new feature. It was a specific against somnolency. It spoke to that House in clear and audible language. It said, "Sleep no more," in such emphatic terms, that from thenceforward he should imagine that such a phænomenon as a sleeping member of parliament would never be seen. He could scarcely now credit what his eyes had formerly beheld, and doubted whether he had been himself awake, when he had seen one member nodding in one part of the House, a second lolling at his length in sound but not quite silent somnolency in another, and a third, a fourth, a fifth, and so on, fast asleep in others. Whatever had happened,

the whole House was hereafter to keep wide awake, let the hour of debate be protracted ever so long.

Mr. Burke next resumed his inquiry into the great difference between members of parliament and peers, and the individuals that usually composed the juries who heard and determined in the courts below. The honourable and learned gentleman, he observed, had said, that men who went to ale-houses and read pamphlets, were not fit to decide on cases of Indian delinquency. To be sure, members of parliament and peers did not usually go much to alehouses, but then they went to taverns and coffee-houses; they drank wine at clubs of various descriptions: but generous wine and good coffee, he supposed, were deemed excellent qualifications for the mind of a man likely to become a member of the new tribunal. Wine enlarged the understanding, and unlocked the dormant faculties of the soul. It made men liberal, and it made them eloquent. Coffee, on the other hand, cleared the head and purified the judgment. It must consequently enable men to see with precision and decide with wisdom. There was, therefore, something in the argument, that those who drank wine and coffee were better qualified to judge and determine than those who drank punch and beer, and such like beverage. But then the honourable and learned gentleman had stated another objection, and that was this: men who read pamphlets were not fit to sit as jurymen in causes of Indian delinquency. Pythagoras said to his disciples, abstine à verbis; but he had never heard of such maxims as abstine à pennis,' or abstine à pamphletis;' and he was afraid, that, so far from members of parliament being in that respect properly qualified, the only sure way to get a tribunal so as to meet the honourable and learned gentleman's definition, would be to choose no persons members but such as could neither write nor read.

Mr. Burke contended, that the new judicature was infinitely the worst sort of jury that could be instituted, because

could belong to any panel. The members of it were nominated by the minister, and it was known, soon after the commencement of every session, who they were. This, as gentlemen would see, must expose them to applications of every sort, and they all knew, as members, what sort of applications were made to them when personal questions were likely to be agitated in that House. A jury in the courts below, on the contrary, were unknown till the time they were sworn, and, for a variety of reasons, were not liable to previous application from the parties in whose cause they were to decide. He pressed this upon the consideration of the House, as a matter by no means immaterial or unimportant. He next took notice of the clause in the act of 1786, taking away from the Company all right to compound causes with their servants, and enlarged upon it as a matter highly prejudicial to the Company's interests, declaring that he looked upon compounding, in many cases that might possibly occur, as nothing more than taking five shillings in the pound, which, where the debt was large, was often a recovery of a considerable sum, and which, by being disallowed in future, could not but prove the cause of great loss to the Company. He mentioned Mr. Arnot's book on the criminal laws of Scotland, in terms of great commendation, and said, he doubted not but that a right honourable and learned gentleman opposite to him* had read it. In that book it was recorded, that the right honourable gentleman's father or grandfather was the man to whom his country stood indebted for the restoration of the inestimable right to trial by jury. That was an honour of which any man might be proud; and he hoped the right honourable gentleman did not mean to follow the example of those who lavish away their family estates, and idly abandon his family honour, by being himself the instrument of taking away the right to trial by jury, from the British subjects in India.

* Mr. Dundas.