"
Such a scene can only find its appropriate enactment at the centre of a
great empire and amid a people with an august history behind them,
conscious of present magnificence and confident of future glory.
We are now far into the second century since that memorable spectacle
filled to the walls the great Hall of Westminster.
What was an oligarchy permeated by a fine spirit of liberty and adorned
by the sacred principle of personal freedom, has been superseded by a
socialistic democracy under which personal freedom suffers frequent
curtailments, and liberty is severely abridged by the mandates of trade
unions, the prohibitions of urban potentates, and the usurpations of
medicine men.
Under these cramping and crippling deprivations we have lost the
collective sense of greatness as a race that infused every participator in
the splendid pageant of such an event as the Impeachment of Warren
Hastings. One has but to imagine an impeachment to-day with the
dominant personages in it chosen from the strike leaders and labour
delegates of the proletariat, assisted by promoted railway porters and
ennobled grocers, to perceive what a distance, and down what a
declivity we have travelled since those days when it was impossible for
any great public function to take place without its becoming naturally
and without conscious effort the occasion for a manifestation of the
pomp, circumstance, and splendour inseparable from the solemn acts
of a great people performed by their greatest men.
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