Part II.
HIS STAY IN INDIA AND HIS CAREER IN PARLIAMENT.
Goes to India.—Pursuits there.—Returns home dissatisfied with himself.—Enters Parliament on the Liberal side.—Reasons why he took it.—Fails in first speech.—Merits as an orator.—Extracts from his speeches.—Modern ideas.—Excessive punishments.—Mackintosh’s success as a law reformer.—General parliamentary career.
I.
Sir James Mackintosh, in accepting a place in India, abdicated the chances of a brilliant and useful career in England; still his presence in one of our great dependencies was not without its use—for his literary reputation offered him facilities in the encouragement of learned and scientific pursuits—which, when they tend to explore and illustrate the history and resources of a new empire, are, in fact, political ones; while his attempts to obtain a statistical survey, as well as to form different societies, the objects of which were the acquirement and communication of knowledge, though not immediately successful, did not fail to arouse in Bombay, and to spread much farther, a different and a far more enlightened spirit than that which had hitherto prevailed amongst our speculating settlers, or rather sojourners in the East. The mildness of his judicial sway, moreover, and a wish to return to Europe with, if possible, a “bloodless ermine,”[87] contributed not only to extend the views, but to soften the manners of the merchant conquerors, and to lay thereby something like a practical foundation for subsequent legislative improvement.
To himself, however, this distant scene seems to have possessed no interest, to have procured no advantage. Worn by the climate, wearied by a series of those small duties and trifling exertions which, unattended by fame, offer none of that moral excitement which overcomes physical fatigue; but little wealthier than when he undertook his voyage, having accomplished none of those works, and enjoyed little of that ease, the visions of which cheered him in undertaking it; a sick, a sad, and, so far as the acceptance of his judgeship was concerned, a repentant man, he (in 1810) took his way homewards.
“It has happened,” he observes in one of his letters—“it has happened by the merest accident that the ‘trial of Peltier’ is among the books in the cabin; and when I recollect the way in which you saw me opposed to Perceval on the 21st of February, 1803 (the day of the trial), and that I compare his present situation—whether at the head of an administration or an opposition—with mine, scanty as my stock is of fortune, health, and spirits, in a cabin nine feet square, on the Indian Ocean, I think it enough that I am free from the soreness of disappointment.”
There is, indeed, something melancholy in the contrast thus offered between a man still young, hopeful, rising high in the most exciting profession, just crowned with the honours of forensic triumph, and the man prematurely old, who in seven short years had become broken, dispirited, and was now under the necessity of beginning life anew, with wasted energies and baffled aspirations.
But Sir James Mackintosh deceived himself in thinking that if the seven years to which he alludes had been passed in England, they would have placed him in the same position as that to which Mr. Perceval had ascended within the same period. Had he remained at the bar, or entered Parliament instead of going to India, he might, indeed, have made several better speeches than Mr. Perceval, as he had already made one; but he would not always have been speaking well, like Mr. Perceval, nor have pushed himself forward in those situations, and at those opportunities, when a good speech would have been most wanted or most effective. At all events, his talents for active life were about to have a tardy trial; the object of his early dreams and hopes was about to be attained—a seat in the House of Commons. He took his place amongst the members of the Liberal opposition; and many who remembered the auspices under which he left England, were somewhat surprised at the banner under which he now enlisted.