Burke's spacious mind was informed by a passion for justice. He was not cast in the mould of men who make concessions to their virtues or compacts with their virtues. He could not for a moment admit that the aggrandizement of the empire should be gained by a single act of injustice, and in his eyes Warren Hastings's career was stained by a long succession of acts of injustice. He certainly would not do evil that good might come of it. If the Rohilla war was a crime, if the execution of Nand Kumar was an infamy, if the deposition of Chait Singh and the plundering of the Begums were crimes, then no possible advantage that these acts might cause to the temporal greatness of the State could weigh for one moment in the balance with Burke. In the high court of Burke's mind Warren Hastings was a doomed, a degraded man, even though it could have been proved, as indeed it would have been hard to prove, that any ill deeds which Warren Hastings had done were essential to the maintenance of English rule and English glory in India. Burke argued that English rule in India, English glory in India, did not gain but only lost by ill deeds. But if England's gain and England's glory in India depended upon such deeds, he for his part would have refused the gain and shuddered at the glory. If Burke's all-conquering passion was a passion for justice, perhaps his keenest political taste was for India and the affairs of India. At a time when our Indian Empire was merely in its dawn, at a time when the affairs of India were looked upon by the nation at large as the commercial matters of a company, Burke allowed all the resources of his great mind to be employed in the study of India. He {273} knew India--he who had never sailed its seas or touched its shores--as probably no other Englishmen of his time knew India, not even those whose lives had been for the most part passed in the country. And this comprehensive knowledge Burke was able to impart again with a readiness that was never unreliable, with a copiousness that was never redundant. He gave a fascination to the figures of Indian finance; he made the facts of contemporary Indian history live with all the charm of the most famous events of Greek or Roman history. India in his hands became what it rightly is, but what few had thought it till then, one of the most fascinating of human studies. Indian affairs on his lips allied all the allurement of a romance with all the statistical accuracy of a Parliamentary report. Such a genius for the presentation of facts inspired by such a passion for justice has enriched English literature with some of its noblest and most truthful pages.