for a time, to make his fortune or discharge his duties, and retire home after twenty years of labour with an income or a pension. It is, and must always be, to him a place of exile, not a home either for the present or the future.

It is obvious, therefore, at a glance, that the principles which now govern the colonial policy of Great Britain are wholly inapplicable here. We admit-and most wisely and righteously admit-the colonists to govern themselves and the country which they have turned from a desert into a garden, and in which they and their children look for an abiding inheritance, according to their own notions, and through the instrumentality of citizens chosen by themselves. But to transfer these British privileges and institutions to Hindostan,-to govern India by a governor and a legislative council elected by the scanty and scattered European residents, who should introduce their own language, their own laws, their own fancies and political desires, into the administration which controls one hundred and fifty millions of an alien race, -would be to hand over that magnificent empire to an oligarchy almost without a parallel in history. Yet this is pretty much the demand of those chance residents in India who, in the late "Calcutta Petition," have shown so much modesty in their requirements, and such a rare sense of propriety in the time selected for urging them. It is difficult to conceive what possible claim ten thousand European merchants and indigo-planters and journalists can have to govern, or to choose those who govern, a mighty and populous dependency, merely on the ground that they have gone thither for a time to buy silk, to plant indigo, or to edit newspapers, though they may know nothing of the complicated character and wants, and may care nothing about the enduring welfare, of the people whose management they would thus presumptuously assume, And assuredly it would not be easy to name a political crime or blunder equal in enormity to that of granting their preposterous demand.

It is clear, then, that India cannot be left, as a colony of Englishmen, to govern itself. It is equally clear that we cannot -at present at least, nor for an indefinite period to come-govern it as a dependency through the medium of our dependents. It seems almost superfluous to add a word of elucidation on this head. India is to us a conquered country. The completion of our conquest dates only from yesterday. We are still surrounded by all the rankling hatreds of defeated cupidity and mortified ambition. In every quarter of the land swarm foes whose plans of aggrandisement we have thwarted, whose crimes we have punished, whose oppressions we have prevented, whose marauding propensities we have put down. We are surrounded too by a vast and ignorant population, who cannot understand many of our excellences, and who mistrust and misinterpret many of our

most beneficent and wisest schemes. We shock their prejudices and alarm their faith by every action of our lives. The Mahometans are scandalised because we eat the unclean swine. The Hindoos are outraged because we eat the sacred cow. In the eyes of both we are infidels and pagans,-gifted with marvellous powers, but guilty of ineffable abominations. The mass of the people, it is true,-the merchants and the cultivators of the soil, -appreciate our rigid and certain and even-handed justice, and bless the security with which they can trade and sow and reap under our sway; and numbers of those who come in contact with us regard us with sincere affection. But unfortunately those who love and value us,-those whom we have served and protected and rescued from oppression,-though the millions, are the ignorant, the apathetic, and the powerless. Those whom we have controlled, those whom we have cast down from the thrones and ministerial musnuds they had disgraced, those whose victims we have rescued, those whose career we have spoiled, those whom we have reduced to impotence and harmlessness, though the hundreds only, are the able, the energetic, the wealthy, and the feared. It is these through whom we must govern, if we govern through native agency.

But, in truth, committing the government of India to the natives of India, even under our superintendence, is at present a chimera. It may come some day; we hope it will. But it must come when Hindoos have learned to know us better than they do at present, and have become something very different from their present selves,-when those competent and honest natives whom we now point to as wonderful exceptions shall have become numerous and common. What native rule is, every state in India has had bitter experience; some are experiencing it still. And no one who knows what it is will hesitate to affirm that, for mingled incapacity and iniquity, the worst times in the worst governments of Italy and Spain can afford not only no parallel, but no conception. Few crimes could equal that of replacing any portion of a country committed to our keeping under the infliction of such an intolerable scourge.

There remains, then, only the third alternative. India must. be governed, as hitherto, as a dependency of our empire, by the instrumentality of a body of trained and permanent officials subject only to metropolitan control,-by a despotic bureaucracy, in fact, responsible to the free country whose ministers and delegates they are. This system ought to supply one of the best governments conceivable. And here we are glad to be able to fortify our views by those of one of the most thoughtful, competent, and sagacious of the writers whose works we have placed at the head of this article. Mr. Cameron, long resident in India, and holding there a high official position, says:

"This famous constitution [that of Great Britain] is wholly unfit for the Indian nations, and I acknowledge that I should think it unnecessary for their welfare if it were much less unfit for them than it is. My own opinion is, that the best government for India, at least in her present condition, is a despotic government; and that the inhabitants of that country, European as well as Asiatic, should derive the assurance which they ought to possess against the abuse of power, not from any political privileges exercised by themselves, but first from the fact that none are admitted to the highest offices in the country but those who (whatever may be their origin) have received the moral and intellectual training of British functionaries: secondly, from the fact that all the proceedings of the Indian governments are submitted in detail to the criticism and correction of authorities in England: and lastly, from the fact that those authorities are responsible to the British Parliament. In this way, as it seems to me, the advantages of despotic and of constitutional government are united, while the disadvantages of both are avoided in a remarkable degree. For an AngloSaxon population such a scheme would not perhaps be successful, however good the government resulting from it; for that race seems to affect self-government even more than good government. But for the indigenous races of India, the few Anglo-Saxons who go there to employ capital and to return, and the small colonies of Anglo-Saxons which will perhaps settle in the temperate climates of the hill-countries, I believe that such a scheme of administration is at the present time much the best that could be devised. I incline to think that such a scheme will always be the best: for it is no stationary system; on the contrary, it is one which will go on continually reflecting all the successive improvements of the constitutional and progressive system, from which its principles of administration are derived, and to which they must conform.

The government of India is a government of British statesmen, who have the same education as other British statesmen in political economy, jurisprudence, and the other sciences which minister to the art of government; who are not habitually deflected from their proper course by any party considerations, nor hindered in their attempts at doing justice to all classes; and who are in a position not only to feel with perfect impartiality, but to act with perfect impartiality, towards all the various interests for which they legislate" (Address to Parliament, p. 41).

The people of India are a special race, and require to be dealt with on a special system and by specially trained rulers. The ordinary principles and plans on which we may safely and judiciously act in the management of Europeans will admit of only a very partial, limited, and modified application in Hindostan. An Englishman of average capacity may be sent out to govern a colony of Englishmen with little risk, because he has to deal with characters and institutions with which he is familiar, and with which his sympathies are in unison. Common sense, proper feeling, conscientious diligence, and ordinary knowledge, will

enable him to discharge his functions in a fair and creditable manner. But common sense and the ordinary education of an Englishman would be as inadequate in the bureau of an Indian ruler as in the operating-room of a hospital or the laboratory of a chemist. It is eminently characteristic of our countrymen to wish to introduce England every where to see every where an embryo or a possible England-to believe that English motives will influence every people, that English institutions can be engrafted in every land, that English ideas have, or can be made to have, currency in every quarter of the globe. Now in no country are these characteristic notions and tendencies so completely at fault, or so imminently dangerous, as in Hindostan. Europeans and Asiatics are full of moral and mental diversities -diversities which we believe to be indigenous, but which, whether indigenous or not, have in the course of centuries, and by the operation of religion, climate, education, and hereditary habitudes, become now a second nature. The lion and the tiger scarcely the sheep-dog and the spaniel certainly-do not differ more widely than the Oriental and the Occidental types of humanity. And of these discrepant races, the Englishman stands at one extreme of the European, and the Hindoo at the other extreme of the Asiatic. Greater contrasts-more deeply-ingrained contrasts-it would be difficult to conceive. They mutually represent all the most opposite, irreconcilable, hostile elements in human nature. The one an hereditary bondsman; the other, beyond all things, free. The one the very embodiment and symbol of stagnation; the other the incarnation of indefatigable energy and restless progress. The life and civilisation of the Hindoo moulded in the relentless tyranny of immutable caste; that of the Englishman breathing the very idolatry of change. The one contented even in wretchedness; the other dissatisfied and impatient in the midst of luxury and joy. The one hemmed-in with ceremonies and prejudices, the victim and the slave of the most senseless fanaticism upon earth; the other hating ceremony, despising all prejudices but his own, and too prone, in the pride of a pure religion and a splendid science, to trample on the fanaticism of all around him. Finally, the flagrant faults and offensive peculiarities of the Briton redeemed by an imperious sense of duty; the many amiable and engaging qualities of the Hindoo neutralised by a destitution of all notion of public morality, which to us seems absolutely appalling and inconceivable.

In truth, the character of our Indian subjects is a nice problem to deal with, and a difficult matter to understand. At our peril we are bound to study and to fathom it. That the knowledge of it possessed by the most experienced European residents has hitherto been imperfect, the late occurrences have painfully

shown. But we do not infer from these sad events that our countrymen were deceived in their estimate of the native character; but simply that one element of it, hitherto latent, had escaped their penetration. We do not believe that the attachment and fidelity of the sepoys, in which all their officers without exception placed such confidence, was unreal or simulated; but that qualities and passions co-existed with these feelings which had hitherto lain dormant, but which, when once excited, were powerful enough to override all others. We believe all that we have heard of their devotion to their officers, their respect for European ladies, their fondness for their masters' children. Till now, there had been ample justification for the confidence felt by English officers in the trustworthiness and bravery of their troops. Till now, there can be no doubt that unguarded ladies could and did travel throughout the length and breadth of India, attended or not by sepoys, without the fear or the risk of insult or neglect. Till now, the servants and the soldiers of our countrymen displayed and felt a tender attachment for the little white infants who played among them nearly equal to that of their own parents, and yet more demonstrative. All this was not put on it was the genuine product of their ordinary nature; and we were amply warranted in counting on it under all ordinary circumstances. But two peculiarities in the native character seem to have escaped our observation: and it is no wonder that they did so. The first is their impressibility, the second their animal ferocity—both partaking of the features and reaching the excess of actual insanity. The CHILD and the SAVAGE lie very deep at the foundations of their being. The varnish of civilisation is very thin, and is put off as promptly as a garment. Their utter ignorance prepared them to believe any absurdities; their brutal superstition rendered them capable of enacting any horTheir religion and their caste form the assailable and excitable side of the Hindoo mind. There is nothing remarkable in this. People so incapable of reasoning, and so accessible to stimulus, could be easily persuaded, where appearances chanced to confirm the poisonous suggestions poured into their minds by emissaries from without, that we had hostile designs against their religion and their caste. This, too, was natural enough. But the point to which we desire to draw special attention, is the degree to which the spread of the mutiny and its more atrocious features partook of the character of an epidemic or contagious nervous disorder-a species of physical cerebral excitement. Viewed in any other light-or rather viewed apart from this peculiarity-the whole movement seems unaccountably insane. It broke out at first not in undefended places, but where there were strong detachments of European troops. The excitement gained some regiments, and was on the point of exploding, when

rors.