The same jealousy exhibits itself in regard to the natives themselves. It was not without cause, that, in 1833, Mr.Charles Grant proposed to the Legislature that express recognition of Indian rights which is contained in the CharterAct. To ignore their existence was ever the policy of the Direction. So far was that dark and cruel policy carried, that it used to be actually made an objection to the eligibility of even European lads for writerships or cadetships, that they were suspected of inheriting, by the mother's or grandmother's side, the taint of Hindú or of Mussulman blood. Candidates were subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny in that respect. Their very nails were examined in quest of the indiciae of disqualification. The late Charles Wynn, one of the truest and wisest friends of India and her people, when President of the Board of Control in 1827-28, had the honour of compelling the Court of Directors to abandon the inquisitorial and scandalous practice. But the prejudice remained, and it was necessary to guard against it. It was therefore declared by the present Charter-Act, "that no native of India, nor any natural-born subject of the Crown resident therein, should, by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them, be disabled from holding ANY place, office, or employment under the Company." The minister who proposed that clause distinctly stated that the intention of it was to declare the qualification of the natives for the highest local offices, that of Councillor not excepted. He did not foresee that the local patronage would be largely influenced, at least, by the preferences and antipathies of the Court of Directors, reflected through every department of "the Service." Twenty years have elapsed; and, far from being allowed a Voice or place in the Councils of their own land, not one of the natives has to this hour been admitted to the first and indispensable preliminary step in the career of "the Service"-a cadetship or a writership. The twenty-four Directors enjoy the exclusive patronage in such cases, and they know how to exercise it. Parliament proposes, but the Court disposes. Let the Metcalfes, the Munros, the Wellesleys, and the Elphinstones protest their fill, and be the qualifications of the candidate what they may, if he be a native of British India he must not rise to honour, wealth, or greatness upon the soil of

his birth.t

The spirit of monopoly pervades every department of administration. Not only are all

+ 3 and 4 William IV. c. 85. s. 87.

*See the admirable remarks on this subject, of Mr. Sullivan, late member of Council, contained in "Remarks on the Affairs of India, &c." (pp. 135-150), one of the

Works noticed at the head of this paper.

the natives excluded from honourable employment, but there is the same barrier to the admission of Europeans, except those few who have breathed in boyhood the confined air of Haileybury, and taken, at puberty, the Company's covenants. The pressing wants of the public service are altogether thrown out of view, and the only consideration is, how to adjust the number of principal appointments to the limited number of covenanted Europeans, so as to leave as little as possible for the uncovenanted, or the native classes of candidates. The desired result is certainly obtained. The natives, as Mr. Sullivan states, are excluded from every civil office of real dignity and emolument, although 97 per cent. of the business of the country is avowedly done by the native subordinates; and although, according to Lord Metcalfe, almost the whole of the remainder has been also done by natives, whilst "their European employers have enjoyed the credit, and reaped the advantage." It is also true, that the uncovenanted Englishman is discouraged; and that, so long as the system lasts, there is very little reason to apprehend the inroads of English enterprise, English curiosity, and English hatred of injustice, upon the dark places of the Company's government. But, important as these objects may appear to the Company, it is also true that there are others of far greater consequence in the estimation of the public, which, under the present system, are totally lost. Lord Metcalfe concludes by declaring it to be "the cause of the inefficiency of the European, and the corruption of the native." Inefficient indeed must be an administration composed of some 800 officials, and charged with the government of 150,000,000 of people, inhabiting a territory not inferior in extent to Europe. Corrupt indeed must be its working; for whilst the inefficient few monopolize all the legitimate emoluments, and far more beside, the pittance assigned to the despised subordinates, "without whose assistance it could not be carried on for a day," is barely sufficient for their decent maintenance. The people are confounded at our inconsistency in this respect. The difficulties of procuring effectual superintendence amongst the European inhabitants are confessed to be insuperable; and yet we go on adding complexity after complexity to our system, and making it more costly, as well as more complicated, at every turn; and still we pretend to concentrate the administration in the hands of one small, inefficient, and overpaid class of Europeans. "Where they dare to speak their minds," says Colonel Sleeman, himself a Company's servant, "the natives say, 'We see you are men who have nothing on earth to do but to collect your revenues, and to decide our disputes about pounds, shillings, and

pence, which we used to decide much better among ourselves, when we had no other court but that of our elders to appeal to.""

It cannot be pretended that the superiority of the favoured class compensates for its numerical unfitness. On the contrary, it is the concurrent judgment of all the great statesmen who have had to do with India, that not only is the "service," as hitherto regulated, a failure, but that it is constitutionally unsusceptible of improvement. The education which prepares them for the covenant narrows their minds. At College they see and converse with none but their own class. The superiors, to whom they are taught to look up with implicit confidence and respect, were brought up at the same College, and are bound by the same covenant which it is appointed unto them also once to take. Haileybury and Addiscombe are to them microcosms of the empire which they shall one day rule-of India, such as the preceding alumni of those Institutions have made it. Their inmates are the privileged ones; "without are dogs." The term of tuition past, they go forth, but not into the world. They pass from the College to the quarter-deck of the Indiaman, or to the Overland Mail, and they carry with them all the crudities of youth, and all the prejudices imbibed from their alma mater, to the scene of action, where there is no repentance for the one, nor experience to be gleaned for the correction of the other.

On the contrary, every step they take in their official career serves but to confirm them in the errors of their nurture. If there be one predominant sentiment among the Company's servants in India, it is their contempt for its people. Captain Harvey, a late author on Indian affairs, served ten years in the army, and found that feeling universal there, and habitually and coarsely venting itself in insults and cruelties to the native officers and soldiery, of a character the most galling, inhuman, and unwise. Lord Ellenborough, in a passage elsewhere cited, deplores the prevalence of the same bad spirit in the civil as well as in the military service. Mr. Shore, one of the ablest servants the Company ever had, testifies that one of the most opprobrious expressions which can be applied to an European in India is "He is fond of the natives;" and that Lord Ellenborough is wrong in supposing that the principle of treating the people as a degraded, inferior race was less rife under the last Charter than under the present. We ourselves have heard a military gentleman, filling a high position under the Company at the Nizam's court, often and bitterly complain of the systematic and studied disrespect-not to say brutality-with which men of the highest rank and consideration, whether in our own territories or in the

tributary states, were habitually treated in his presence by his brethren of " the service;" and even by those who, in their intercourse with their own countrymen, were most remarkable for their amiable dispositions and gentlemanly deportment. "The Hindús," says Mir Shahamut Ali, writing in 1848, "are certainly treated as contemptuously by many of their European masters, as the animals of the forest. Even the women taunt their husbands and male relatives for their patient submission." He adds, that "their conduct does not meet with due punishment from government." * If he had said that their conduct is but a manifestation outwardly of the spirit which inwardly directs the councils of that government, the worthy Moonshee would have been nearer the truth.

If the moral qualifications of "the eight hundred" for the tremendous functions of arbitrary rule are doubtful, it is no reflection upon their intellectual powers to say that these are insufficient. It is not in the nature of things that an empire so vast, so important, and so populous, should be adequately governed, by the ablest of rulers, under so confused, incongruous, and unnatural scheme of policy, as that contained in the Honourable Company's Code of Regulations. But, whilst supreme excellence itself must confess itself unequal to such a task, it appears that the capacities of the Indian service do not at any rate exceed the average. We do not wish to disparage that service. We are contented to take their own estimate of themselves, and we give it, as nearly as brevity will permit, in their own language.

The Court of Directors alone make all appointments in India, except those of the Judges of the Supreme Court and the Protestant Bishops, which are made by the Crown, and those of Governor-General, Governor, and Legislative Member of Council, which are made by the Crown and Court of Directors jointly. The Secretary to the Court "has never known an instance in which a native of India has been appointed a writer or cadet." The natives are

* Mir Shahamut Ali quotes, from the reports of courtsmartial in The Indian News of the 4th July 1848, two striking and recent instances in illustration. We have only space for the following:-"On the 2d November 1847, Lieutenant --- at Kapurthala (A NATIVE INDFPENDENT STATE IN THE PUNJAB), ordered his servants to maltreat an inhabitant of that maltreat an inhabitant of that place, and caused him to be beaten with a stick; his beard, moustaches, and the hair of his head, to be cut off; his head to be blackened; and shoes to be hung round his neck; and then, mounted on an ass, paraded him about the town; and the lieutenant himself sprinkled the blood of parrots and pigeons on his face. For this violent outrage the lieutenant was tried, and was ordered by the Commander-in-chief, instead of being dismissed, to be reprimanded in the presence of the troops at Lahore!" Mir Shahamut Ali was Moonshee in the Company's service, and was dismissed or superseded for publishing this work.

66

not made covenanted servants. "No appointments are made by the Court on public grounds;" and to the civil service none can be made except in favour of persons who have passed through the College. The age at which students can enter the College is seventeen; and the average age at which they are brought into employment in India is twenty-one or twenty-two. A large portion of the valuable interval is spent in the compulsory pursuit of Sanscrit, and other studies, which are not required in India at all, whilst that of European studies is purely voluntary; and, whilst the student must learn a little of the former, of the latter, if he pleases, he may know nothing at all. The consequence is said to be, that the idle majority-that is to say, "all those who are not inclined to serve two masters-stick to the Oriental languages, and despise the European sciences; because the one secures their appointments and their pay, the other only tends to make them efficient." No one is ever "plucked," except for his deficiency in the "Orientals." Mr. Campbell mentions his having seen a man passed, reported qualified for the service,' and sent out to India, to whom had been publicly assigned, by each and every professor of European subjects the mark which, in one Oriental, would have plucked him that of 'little' which, being interpreted, means nothing." Now, classics, mathematics, history, jurisprudence, law, and moral philosophy, are "European subjects" in the sense of Haileybury; and the young magistrates and sucking judges, to whose good pleasure are consigned 150,000,000 of men, at a distance of 15,000 miles from the range of European observation, may, we are told, be "utterly ignorant of these without injury to his prospects. Thus prepared, about two-thirds of the students arrive in India "between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three," all qualified by certificate; all possessing "a little Sanscrit, which is of no use, and two Oriental languages pro tanto useful;" a few having acquired for themselves "the first principles of jurisprudence and political economy;" but the greater number knowing nothing whatever but their Sanscrit and two tongues. We agree with Mr. Campbell in thinking that it is a very poor consolation to the forlorn natives, whom these gentlemen are sent to govern, to know that "greater fools are admitted into all other professions" here in Europe!*

Arrived in India, "the writer" has a year or two of leisure allotted to him by the Local Government, for getting into debt and sowing his wild oats at the Presidency. After this, his

Commons' Report on Indian Territories (1852), J. C. Melvill, Q. 232-297; and Sir T. H. Maddock, Q. 128687. Campbell's "Modern India," pp. 264-268.

career commences: he becomes an Assistant Collector. If he pleases his superiors, he obtains a Collectorate at no distant day. If he does not please them, he obtains it somewhat later. Promotions in India are entirely made by the Local Government, the Court of Direc tors being incapacitated by Statute to interfere. Seniority is the rule; but the exceptions are numerous. "The most indifferent officers get on the slowest, and yet attain a certain rank in time. So many men get into debt at the commencement, that they only attain the pleasant places of the service comparatively late, and then cannot or will not retire. So it happens that some of the higher appointments are for long blocked up by elderly men, never brilliant, and now inefficient, yet not so bad as to be positively ejected." We have here to remind our readers that the offices thus bestowed and exercised are those of police, revenue, diplomacy, government, and justice !+

The Collectorate and the Magistracy are in some provinces separate offices, but in others they are united. Where they are separate, the Magistrate is "the lowest officer, and by far the best paid." In both cases, the Collector ranks immediately below the Judge, who is the highest officer in the district, exercising original and appellate jurisdiction in civil and criminal cases, and judging, sentencing, and punishing, very much at his will; for in many instances no appeal lies from his judgment, and it is only in capital, and a few other very special cases, that his sentences have to be referred to the Sudder Adawlut, or chief court at the Presidency, before execution. The duties of the Judge are essentially different from those of the Collector: the Collectorate, nevertheless, is the sure and necessary road to the Judgeship. He who has been a Collector, and is "old enough," is made a Judge, whenever he chooses to renounce the ambition which points to the Secretariats, the chief courts, or the revenue boards, and to rest satisfied for life with a salary of 3000l. a year; for, once a Judge, he has no further claim for promotion on the ground of mere seniority. The Judgeship is, in truth, avowed to be a kind of retiring pension for worn out or incapable Collectors. We are told by Mr. Campbell, that "comparatively few, much above mediocrity, remain to be Judges;" that "many hang on when they are old and worn out" and that men are now nearly entitled to their pensions" before they give up ambition, and consent to accept Judgeships. But again, this is not all. "Some who mismanage their districts are said to be promoted Judges against their will. If a man is fit for any thing at all, he is fit for a

+ Commons' Report ubi suprà. Campbell's "Modern India," pp. 270-273."

It has long been a much vexed question, both in India and at home, whether the distinction accorded to Europeans of enjoying, within certain limits, the protection of the English common law, and of English common lawyers sitting as Judges in the Supreme Court at each Presidency to administer that law, ought any longer to be continued. The question appears to us to have been needlessly embarrassed by the mode in which it has been proposed. We agree with those who think the privilege an odious one. Justice, we think, should be administered with even hands to all the Queen's subjects. The laws and the courts which are good enough for one class, ought to suffice for the other. If, on the other hand, they are so bad that a mere handful of expatriated Englishmen do not and cannot speak or think of them without abhorrence and loathing, and laugh to scorn the idea of their being compelled to acknowledge such judges and such laws, we are unable to see on what principle of justice 150 millions of British subjects, not expatriated, but living tranquilly upon their own native soil, are to be sneered at or denounced as "male-contents" by any one, and least of all by the uncovenanted European residents, or their Indian organs,† for raising their voices against a system so vicious and disastrous. English or Alien, Christian or Paynim, there lives not the man to whom a pure and wise administration of justice is not of the highest concern and moment;-and the people of British India, to a very considerable extent, are, by the "Regulation Law" of the Honourable Company, denied that blessing. They remonstrate, but in vain. They petition, but Parliament is deaf. They suffer, but the India House is heedless-perhaps ignorant of their sufferings. The records of the India House are framed by other hands than theirs, and for other purposes than the condemnation of a system under which the compilers prosper. Mr. Secretary Melville, and Mr. Mill his colleague, talk of the prosperity of India under that system, and delude the Committees of Lords and Commons, who have no other sources of reference, into crediting what they talk. Even

Mr. Morley-who, like them, is a stranger to India, and founds all his opinions upon information supplied out of the company's own archives appeals to "practical experience;" declares that "the system was well conceived, and well applied;" imagines British India as "exhibiting, on a very grand scale, prosperous results," which have no existence; and attributes those results to the laws of the Company and their courts of the Mofussil and the Sudder.

It is a glowing picture; but with the melancholy facts before us, we are compelled to doubt of its truth. Mr. Campbell, who has served in India, and speaks from "practical experience" of the system thus bepraised, and of which in his time he has been pars magna, gives his sober and unconscious testimony quite the other way. "It has long ago been remarked," he says, "that the civil servants are not 'juris periti;' and they are not likely to become so, unless we have, first, good, clear, intelligible codes, and second, a good judicial training. To speak generally of their qualifications for their ap pointments, I should say that the judicial part of the work is very indifferently performed."§ And we should wonder much if it were otherwise, If, as Mr. Morley thinks, and as we are disposed to agree, the Judges of Her Majesty's Supreme Courts, who exist for the benefit of the privileged English, and "certainly possess the advantage of a legal education in this country," are to be esteemed insufficient for their posts, because "totally unacquainted with more than one branch of the laws they are called upon to administer" to the English at the Presidency ;|| surely we may be pardoned for agreeing with Mr. Campbell too, who thinks the Company's Judges even less sufficient in their way, as being "totally unacquainted" with even a single branch of the laws which they are called upon to administer to the natives at the Presidency, and to all the Queen's subjects, native or European, beyond it.

It is true that, side by side with the Queen's Supreme Courts at the Presidency, the Company's Sudder Adawlut, or chief court of civil and criminal jurisdiction, sits for the hearing of appeals from the inferior Judges; and that, as we have seen, the gravest sentences of

Morley's "Analytical Digest," &c. Vol I. Introduction, p. clvi.

Campbell's "Modern India,” p. 281.

Vol. I. Introduction, p. ii. This able and learned writer, whose excellent compilation is noticed in another page, has more than once gone out of his way to express an opinion of his own in the old case of The Company v. the Queen, and in favour of the first. But the opinion of a partisan is of little weight: and "the much-calumniated judge, Sir Elijah Impey" (p. xxxix.), "the notorious Francis" (p. clxi.), "the great Governor-general, Warren Hastings" (p. clxxxi.), and other phrases of the same kind, which abound in his pages, testify to the strength of his partisanship.

criminals are referred to them before they can be put in execution. But the same vice attaches to the appellate as to the inferior court. Mere seniority, indeed, is not considered a qualification; but preferment is not the less a privilege. The seats in the Sudder are "prizes-few among many;" and prizes of accident, not of merit. For the most part, "they are given" continues Mr. Campbell (p. 276) "to those in the Secretariat line;" an odd description of a whimsical course of preferment. Conceive Secretary Walpole and Mr. D'Israeli appointing their chief clerks to be Chief Justice of England and Chief Baron of the Exchequer! Yet the Sudder Adawlut, composed of gentlemen thus strangely selected, is to India what the people of all the courts of Westminster put together, including the High Court of Parliament, are to the people of this United Kingdom-the highest court of justice. In other important respects the Sudder enjoys a power not given to any one British court of justice no, nor to all collectively. In other realms no sentence or judgment of any kind can be rendered, in any case whatever, except in open court by the mouths of the Judges, in the presence of the parties, and after oral and public examination of the witnesses. In the Company's high tribunals it is otherwise. The examination-even in criminal cases-is not oral, nor is publicity requisite. A transcript of the depositions-or, in some cases, where these are not taken in Persian-a mere translation, certified as accurate under the seal of an officer, who is not required to understand the language, is sufficient to inform the religion," as Robespierre would say, "of the Court." The proceeding before the Sudder is private. There is no meeting in court to consider the case, or to give judgment. If it be considered at all, it is at home; and the written sentence is the only record of the presumed opinions of the Judges who subscribe it. A still more tremendous point of difference remains to be stated. No capital sentence of any kind rendered here, by any court, however exalted, not even though it be the sentence of the High Court of Parliament itself, is ever executed until the pleasure of the Crown has been obtained, or at least the opportunity allowed for interposing the prerogative of mercy. The capital sentences of the Sudder Courts-with the rare and doubtful exception of those pronounced upon crimes of a treasonable character are carried into effect without awaiting the pleasure of the Crown's representative in India, or of any authority whatever. This fact has been sometimes denied by the less scrupulous champions

*See Hansard's Parl. Debates: House of Commons, 3d April 1851, for a curious instance of this.

of" things as they are," but the denial has not been accompanied by any effort to disprove the charge. For the future they must be contented to bear it in silence; for the authority of Mr. Morley-who honourably, though perhaps not without reluctance, admits the fact is too high at the India House to be disputed by its overzealous advocates.+

The Company's courts were originally forbidden to hold jurisdiction over Europeans. But the prohibition has for some time past been gradually repealed, so far as it regarded civil suits, matters of revenue, and wrongs done to natives not amounting to felonies. It is now proposed to repeal it altogether and we see no objection to the proposition. The iniquities of the judicial system are so glaring, that the presence of an accuser is all that is wanting to effect its downfall. An Englishman would not bear for one hour the stupid tyranny under which an Asiatic groans, but against which he dares not remonstrate. We wish to interest the "uncovenanted" English in seeking the reform of the laws which procure the oppression of 150 millions of their fellow subjects. The "Black Acts" will extend those laws in all their dire integrity to the English. We are therefore favourable to the "Black Acts," and we trust that they will become law. The overthrow of the Company's judicial system will be the speedy consequence. On no other terms can the English community expect to achieve their own deliverance from the tyranny with which they are threatened. They have long borne with great composure the spectacle of the wrongs done to the natives. They begin to abhor oppression only when it approaches themselves. The extension that has already taken place has enabled them to taste somewhat of the bitterness of the system, and the effect is wonderful. They cannot understand why "an indigo planter of the highest respectability, named Cruise," should have been "tied up with ropes, gagged with a dhotee (cloth) for nearly two hours, with his face twisted away up to the ceiling of a court-house, sent to jail, outraged, insulted, refused bail for twenty-four hours more, illegally held to bail, and fined 500 rupees for pretended resistance to a process which never was issued," and yet no reparation exacted, either by the Sudder Adawlut or the Supreme Court, from the wrong doers, "Mr. Pearson, the boy magistrate of Purneah, and Mr. Pringle, the Sessions or District Judge." They cannot conceive the enormous impunity accorded to so much audacity and ignorance, as are evinced in that precious specimen of Mofussil procedure, the writ on which the proceedings in

+"Analytical Digest" &c. Vol. i. Introd. pp. cii.

CV. CX.

E