In his efforts in behalf of India Burke again met with apparent defeat, but in this case he virtually secured the results at which he had aimed. During the seventeenth century the English East India Company, originally organized for trade, had acquired possessions in India, which, in the middle of the eighteenth century and later, the genius of Clive and Warren Hastings had increased and consolidated into a great empire. The work which these men had done was rough work and it could not be accomplished by scrupulous methods; under their rule, as before, there had been much irregularity and corruption, and part of the native population had suffered much injustice and misery. Burke and other men saw the corruption and misery without realizing the excuses for it and on the return of Hastings to England in 1786 they secured his impeachment. For nine years Burke, Sheridan, and Fox conducted the prosecution, vying with one another in brilliant speeches, and Burke especially distinguished himself by the warmth of sympathetic imagination with which he impressed on his audiences the situation and sufferings of a far-distant and alien race. The House of Lords ultimately acquitted Hastings, but at the bar of public opinion Burke had brought about the condemnation and reform, for which the time was now ripe, of the system which Hastings had represented. While the trial of Hastings was still in progress all Europe was shaken by the outbreak of the French Revolution, which for the remainder of his life became the main and perturbing subject of Burke's attention. Here, with an apparent change of attitude, for reasons which we will soon consider, Burke ranged himself on the conservative side, and here at last he altogether carried the judgment of England with him. One of the three or four greatest movements in modern history, the French Revolution exercised a profound influence on English thought and literature, and we must devote a few words to its causes and progress. During the two centuries while England had been steadily winning her way to constitutional government, France had past more and more completely under the control of a cynically tyrannical despotism and a cynically corrupt and cruel feudal aristocracy. [Footnote: The conditions are vividly pictured in Dickens' 'Tale of Two Cities' and Carlyle's 'French Revolution.'] For a generation, radical French philosophers had been opposing to the actual misery of the peasants the ideal of the natural right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and at last in 1789 the people, headed by the lawyers and thinkers of the middle class, arose in furious determination, swept away their oppressors, and after three years established a republic. The outbreak of the Revolution was hailed by English liberals with enthusiasm as the commencement of an era of social justice; but as it grew in violence and at length declared itself the enemy of all monarchy and of religion,