The long recital is closed with an appeal which may be fitly regarded as the _locus classicus_ of the argument from circumstance. For with this impressive review of the fierce spirit of the colonists before his audience, Burke declares: “The question is, not whether the spirit deserves praise or blame, but—what, in the name of God, shall we do with it?”[41] The question then is not what is right or wrong, or what accords with our idea of justice or our scheme of duty; it is, how can we meet this circumstance? “I am not determining a point of law; I am restoring tranquillity.”[42] The circumstance becomes the cue of the policy. We must remind ourselves that our concern here is not to pass upon the merits of a particular controversy, but to note the term which Burke evidently considered most efficacious in moving his hearers. “Political reason,” he says, elsewhere, “is a computing principle.”[43] Where does political reason in this instance leave him? It leaves him inevitably in the middle, keeping the Colonies, but not as taxable parts of the Empire, allowing them to pay their own charge by voluntary grants. In Burke’s characteristic view, the theoretic relationship has been altered by the medium until the thirteen (by his count fourteen) colonies of British North America are left halfway between colonial and national status. The position of the Tories meant that either the Colonies would be colonies or they would terminate their relationship with the Empire. Burke’s case was that by concession to circumstance they could be retained in some form, and this would be a victory for policy. Philosophers of starker principle, like Tom Paine, held that a compromise of the Burkean type would have been unacceptable in the long run even to the Americans, and the subsequent crystallization of American nationality seems to support this view. But Burke thought he saw a way to preserve an institution by making way for a large corporeal fact. It must be confessed that Burke’s interest in the affairs of India, and more specifically in the conduct of the East India Company, is not reconcilable in quite the same way with the thesis of this chapter. Certainly there is nothing in mean motives or contracted views to explain why he should have labored over a period of fourteen years to benefit a people with whom he had no contact and from whom he could expect no direct token of appreciation. But it must be emphasized that the subject of this essay is methods, and even in this famous case Burke found some opportunity to utilize his favorite source. In 1783, years before the impeachment of Warren Hastings, he made a long speech in Parliament attacking Fox’s East India Bill. He was by then deeply impressed by the wrongs done the Indians by British adventurers, yet it will be observed that his _habitus_ reveals itself in the following passages. He said of the East India Company: