it is resisted successfully; punishment is enforced, and the indemnity demanded often takes the form of a further grant of land. Necessitous princes borrow, and are unable to pay they give a mortgage on their lands; as defalcations accumulate, the mortgage is foreclosed. Native sovereigns promise, and do not perform; when performance is exacted, a slice of territory is of fered, and accepted, as a quittance. As soon as the intruders have become a Power, jealousies and enmities rise up on every side. Time after time they are treacherously assailed by suspicious or avaricious neighbours: at length, weary of chastising them, they have no alternative but to disarm and weaken them by the confiscation of half their domains. In justice to themselves, these naturalised foreigners form alliances: allies soon become dependents. Feeble states crave protection against powerful and aggressive rivals: protection is granted, in exchange for a consideration; and this consideration is often paid in land. Sometimes the consideration is the inheritance itself in failure of direct issue: after a long term of years the territory lapses. The more powerful we become, the more are we regarded with an evil eye; we are liable to unprovoked assaults on all sides. We fight, we conquer, we make treaties: the treaties are broken; we are again assailed; as a measure of obvious and necessary security we seize a portion of the offender's dominions. He repeats the offence; and we have no alternative but to absorb him altogether. We see preparations making for a formidable league against us: in self-defence we anticipate the blow, and break the league in pieces by the annihilation or impoverishment of its most dangerous members. By this time we find ourselves the paramount race in the country. Our well-governed territories are surrounded by a set of the most villanous and restless governments the world ever saw, which keep us in perpetual disturbance. We exhort them to amend their practices; some promise, and are paid for promising: they break their promise; we insist on its performance; and failing that, endeavour to perform it for them. Many princes, sunk in effeminacy and profligate indulgence, hating trouble, and caring only for sensuality and show, are glad enough to let us govern for them, securing to them a sufficient stipend for their pleasures. And no one who knows the contrast between British and native rule will say that we ought not to accept the bargain, and assume the task. Other states, again, fall into such a condition of anarchy and desolation as to be a curse and a peril to all around them. After long forbearance and remonstrances, in justice to our own subjects we can tolerate the scene no longer: we pension the princes, and we save the people. This is a fair picture of our Indian progress for the last seventy years. We have obeyed an irresistible influence, as relentless as a law of nature. From the

moment we set foot on Indian soil, we had no alternative but either to be ignominiously expelled, or to become lords paramount of the peninsula.

Some writers have been bold enough to ascribe the mutiny to the annexation of Oude. We offer no opinion as to the closeness of the connection between the supposed cause and the alleged effect; some connection no doubt there was. Considering the peculiar constitution of the Bengal army, and the large portion of it recruited from the Oude population, the mode in which the annexation was carried out may have been incautious and unwise; but that the annexation itself was a righteous, a necessary, and a beneficent measure, we cannot question for a moment. We do not believe there can be two opinions on the matter among men who know what the government of Oude was, and what the government of the Company's territories is. The persistent violation of a solemn contract gave us a right; the persistent violation of all laws human and divine made it our duty. If our calamities are really traceable to this annexation, we have been punished for our virtues, not for our sins. We are martyrs, not criminals.

It will be seen from what we have written, that we have a clear and strong opinion as to the title by which we hold India. Some pages of that title-deed are soiled by fraud, some pages of it are stained by blood; but with all its faults and flaws, no other power can show one equal to it. In the earlier times of our residence, we were often selfish, grasping, and unscrupulous. Unhappily we hastened the possession of that which must have become ours in time by many questionable acts and by some unquestionable crimes. But after the period of Warren Hastings a better spirit prevailed, and for more than half a century there have been few blots on our escutcheon, though many errors in our policy. We now hold India by virtue of our greater strength, our nobler capacities, and our deeper sense of duty and responsibility. We hold it in trust for one hundred and fifty millions of subjects, whose happiness we are bound to seek, whose enlightenment we are bound to foster, whose feelings we are bound to respect, whose prejudices even we are bound to outrage as little as we can consistently with the aims of good government and moral progress. So grand an empire and so grave a trust has seldom been committed to a free people-never, probably, since the Roman Republic reigned over half a world. It now remains to consider the principles on which, and the machinery by which, we are to govern India so as worthily to fulfil our high calling.

In the first place, then, India is a DEPENDENCY, and not a COLONY. It has nothing in common with the other portions

of our colonial empire, -with those vast islands and continents abounding in primeval forests and interminable prairies, full of unoccupied lands and nearly empty of inhabitants, scantily peopled, and peopled only by savages of small capacities and feeble frames, subsisting on the precarious produce of the chase, and incapable alike of resisting the progress or adopting the habits of civilisation. In these territories Englishmen have made their homes; they have gone out to reside as well as to subdue; they have conquered the land rather than the inhabitants; their wars have been with rude nature even more than with wild men. In process of time they have so multiplied, and been so replenished by fresh immigration from the mother country, as to constitute nations and societies actually composed of Englishmen, among whom the aboriginal inhabitants form a fraction insignificant in numbers as well as in importance. One after another, as this time arrived, these communities have claimed, and have had conceded to them as a right, all the powers and privileges of selfgovernment for the new colony had been created by them and peopled by them, had become their possession and their home, to whose fortunes they had linked their own hopes and affections for all coming time.

But our settlement and position in Hindostan differs from this picture in every one of its features. India, so far from being scantily peopled, is densely peopled, and the inhabitants outnumber those of Britain in a five-fold ratio. It contains no waste land every field has its owner and its occupier, in whose hands it has remained for generations and for centuries; every acre is cultivated, or has gone out of cultivation solely from bad government or bad agriculture. The natives of India, so far from being savages, or belonging to feeble tribes who can be trodden out or absorbed by the intruding race, are the subjects of a civilisation far older and more complicated than our own,a civilisation which, though vicious and corrupt, is in the highest degree ingenious and elaborate, dates back before the birth of authentic history, and is deeply rooted in the habits and ideas of its victims. Some of their races are powerful and warlike, and have more than once made us buy our victories dear, and even jeopardised our conquests. Many among them are wealthy, polished, intelligent, and even learned after the fashion of their tribe. In fact, our position in regard to them is rather that of the Romans towards the degenerate Greeks, or the Spaniards towards the primitive and noble civilisation of Mexico and Peru, than that of Britons towards the Red Indians, the Hottentots, or the Papuan aborigines. Finally, no Englishman, whether merchant, planter, or official, ever dreams of settling in India: he could not do so; his children cannot thrive there; he himself cannot live there in comfort: he merely goes to reside there

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: