But the defect of this speech, which must still be considered, on the whole, the most inspired product of Burke's great nature, was this,-- that it did not strike its hearers or readers as having _reality_ for its basis or the superstructure raised upon it. Englishmen could not believe then, and most of them probably do not believe now, that it had any solid foundation in incontrovertible facts. It did not "fit in" to their ordinary modes of thought; and it has never been ranked with Burke's "organized" orations; it has never come home to what Bacon called the "business and bosoms" of his countrymen. They have generally dismissed it from their imaginations as "a phantasmagoria and a hideous dream" created by Burke under the impulse of the intense hatred he felt for the administration which succeeded the overthrow of the government, which was founded on the coalition of Fox and North. Now, in simple truth, the speech is the most masterly statement of facts, relating to the oppression of millions of the people of India, which was ever forced on the attention of the House of Commons,--a legislative assembly which, it may be incidentally remarked, was practically responsible for the just government of the immense Indian empire of Great Britain. It is curious that the main facts on which the argument of Burke rests have been confirmed by James Mill, the coldest-blooded historian that ever narrated the enormous crimes which attended the rise and progress of the British power in Hindostan, and a man who also had a strong intellectual antipathy to the mind of Burke. In making the speech, Burke had documentary evidence of a large portion of the transactions he denounced, and had _divined_ the rest. Mill supports him both as regards the facts of which Burke had positive knowledge, and the facts which he deductively inferred from the facts he knew. Having thus a strong foundation for his argument, he exerted every faculty of his mind, and every impulse of his moral sentiment and moral passion, to overwhelm the leading members of the administration of Pitt, by attempting to make them accomplices in crimes which would disgrace even slave-traders on the Guinea coast. The merely intellectual force of his reasoning is crushing; his analysis seems to be sharpened by his hatred; and there is no device of contempt, scorn, derision, and direct personal attack, which he does not unsparingly use. In the midst of all this mental tumult, inestimable maxims of moral and political wisdom are shot forth in short sentences, which have so much of the sting and brilliancy of epigram, that at first we do not appreciate their depth of thought; and through all there burns such a pitiless fierceness of moral reprobation of cruelty, injustice, and wrong, that all the accredited courtesies of debate are violated, once, at least, in every five minutes. In any American legislative assembly he would have been called to order at least once in five minutes.