the body of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress
them. "No man will assert seriously," he said, "that when people are of
a turbulent spirit the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them
with something to complain of." The advantages of subjects were, as he
urged, their right; and a wise government would regard "all their
reasonable wishes as so many claims." To neglect them was to have a
nation full of uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.

There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to
mitigate the evils of Company rule in India. Research may well have
shown that in some details he pressed the case too far; yet nothing has
so far come to light to cast doubt upon the principles he there
maintained. He was the first English statesman fully to understand the
moral import of the problem of subject races; and if he did not make
impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the future, at least he flung an
eternal challenge to their malignant complacency. He did not ask the
abandonment of British dominion in India, though he may have doubted the
wisdom of its conquest. All that he insisted upon was this, that in
imperial adventure the conquering race must abide by a moral code. A
lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white. The European must
respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he would be compelled by
law to respect them in his own State. "If we are not able," he said, "to
contrive some method of governing India well which will not of necessity
become the means of governing Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for
their eternal separation, but none for sacrificing the people of that
country to our constitution." England must be in India for India's
benefit or not at all; political power and commercial monopoly such as
the East India Company enjoyed could be had only insofar as they are
instruments of right and not of violence. The Company's system was the
antithesis of this. "There is nothing," he said in a magnificent