and Bombay, but our manufacturers have stopped the looms of Dacca and Surat." And was it to a West Riding audience that Mr. Forster ventured to make this piteous appeal in favor of protection to native industry? If the Dacca looms are stopped, it is because the thousands of men and women in Bengal and Behar can obtain better and cheaper muslins from England, than they used to obtain from the labour of few scores of superseded workmen on the banks of the Ganges. We raise more revenue than Akbar, yet we run into debt. Akbar was a great sovereign, yet we doubt whether he always paid his coolies. And besides, civilization is expensive. But great expenditure in a country, if not on a civil list, or for the unproductive pleasure of the ruler, is not a source of oppression. The native tax-gatherer was a scoundrel, but could be bribed to keep his distance and cheat his Government. Our taxgatherer makes a just claim, but insists on being paid. This is stated as a grievance of British rule. We really do not know how to answer the charge otherwise than by thus re-stating it. It is not by calumniating the great name of the East India Company that the cause of the reform in India will be assisted. If English Liberals, in or out of the House of Commons, approach the India question with a preconceived idea that, in the wantonness of exiled independence, Anglo-Indians have been rack-renting India, and that the purity of English benevolence and the energy of English rectitude are required to reclaim us into the path of virtue, they will make not only ridiculous, but we fear, dangerous mistakes. Our anxiety as to the future prospects of India has been much relieved by the gradual development of the Tory India bill. John Bull has been humbugged and India has been saved. The Court of Directors has been abolished in name and retained in fact. A great reform has been effected in the office arrangements of Leadenhall Street and Cannon Row, and for the rest, the revolution may be summed up in the words of an old Sheristadar who, after hearing the provisions of the bill explained, expressed his apprehension of the extent of the innovation by remarking "khair--Governor General Sahib ke report malikin kefasjawenge-bus:" The Governor General's reports will go to the Queen instead of the Company-voilà tout! An immense mass of official knowledge and experience will still be interposed between the fate of British India and the doctrinaire ignorance of the House of Commons. But our anxiety for the future of India would be still further assuaged, if those Englishmen who are in the van of English thought and opinion on Indian subjects, would approach the history of our Eastern empire in a less polemical and a more reverent spirit. We have been told lately in the eloquent pages of Mr. Merivale, how the virtue of Rome lingered in the firm and truly Roman Governments of the distant provinces, long after it had disappeared from the degraded precincts of the imperial city. There were still great proconsuls when Emperor and Senate were sunk in a common infamy. God forbid that we should seek to compare the England of Victoria with the Rome of Domitian. But an analogy does exist so far as this, that England abroad is stronger not weaker, better not worse, than England at home. Exiles and fighters live in a less luxurious, a less pleasurable, a less seducing, and a far more bracing atmosphere, than their brethren at home. What Peshawur is to the Punjab, what the Punjab is to India, that India is and long has been to England. Depend upon it, the holders of an advanced post are men to be honored and upheld, not suspected and traduced. For many years while the heart of England seemed to be waxing feeble; while in those gloomy decades which succeeded the close of the great war, the life at the centre seemed in danger of being stifled under the pressure of a fierce reaction of selfish and brutal Toryism; the distant pulses still beat true and healthfully; and in India the revenue system was revolutionized; the rights of women were vindicated from the tyranny of priestly association; innovation followed innovation, while Lord Eldon and the "gentlemen of England" were risking the existence of their country in their timorous desire to stand upon the ancient ways! There is plenty of room for reform in India, but none whatever for self-complacent indiscriminate censure. Let Englishmen by all means study the history of British India; but they will misapprehend that study, and they will mispraise their country, if they approach the subject with an air of patronizing virtue, ready to be scandalized, eager to redress imaginary wrongs. Let them rather regard the conquest and organization of British India as the best and greatest exploit of modern England. There is nothing in this view to promote vanity. Vanity ensues, when we read of great actions in a spirit of contemptuous superiority. Of this at least we feel persuaded, that those who know India best, those who care for India most, those who work for India hardest, are those who, while ever planning some new reform, ever working out some fresh improvement, feel it at the same time most utterly impossible to speak of the British Government in India with rancour, or to regard the British rule in India as other than a blessing. ART. VIII.-1. Topics for Indian Statesmen. By JOHN BRUCE NORTON, Madras. Edited by G. R. Norton. London. Richardson. 1858. 2. India as it may be; an Outline of a Proposed Government and Policy. By GEORGE CAMPBELL, Author of 'Modern India." London. John Murray. Albemarle Street. 1853. T is the nature of man always to expect perfection; it is his fate to be invariably disappointed. Bacon's profound description of poetry, which culminates in the well-known phrase that it" conforms the shews of things to the desires of the mind," is applicable to other arts and sciences; nay to all the more elevated of human pursuits. The loftier the character of an individual or a race, the more constant will be their endeavor to redress the balance of destiny; to temper and mould the sluggish elements of the practicable with the living fire of heaven. Nor all in vain; the standard will never be attained; but the long centuries bring amelioration to such, and to such alone, of the tribes of earth; and ideal exertions come to be looked on in anything but a contemptible light. Napoleon Bonaparte, in his worldly selfsufficiency, may think that he brands with an ineradicable reproach such thinkers as Madame de Stael, when he speaks of them as "ideologists;" but we may feel sure that, if indeed angels be the audience before whom is played this drama of ours upon the theatre of the universe, the pity of those holy spectators is very far removed from scorn, when they see the dull incidents of mortality encountered with a divine enthusiasm; and the weak and straitened creatures of a day toiling towards that inly felt eternity, where truth and beauty and good are all to be merged in ONE. Neither ought we to suppose that these yearnings and half effective struggles are confined to any one place or period. The trite saying of the royal preacher is still the text of the truest philosophy. There is still nothing new under the sun. The thing that has been is still that which shall be; the thing that is done here, the thing done elsewhere. Hence the interest with which the sympathetic thinker must ever regard history; and hence it is that men, surrounded by the grim difficulties of their own day, turn again and again for experience and consolation to the thoughts and doings of their predecessors, to find that others have borne and done before them as they are doing and bearing now; and that the errors introduced by their own too ardent speculations have their counterpart in the baffled dreams and broken purposes of the past. Turning so to great empires of a bye-gone day, we find: "That all beneath the moon decays, And what by mortals in this world is brought And thus we may look to arrive at many rules of conduct for ourselves; what to do and what to avoid. If, for instance, it should appear that in Assyria, in Persia, in Rome, in the French monarchy, in the old colonial empire of Britain, there was always some one fatal disorder which sooner or later engendered ruin; and then, turning to the present state of India, we should find it working with baneful effect in our own system, of what shall we not be deserving if we do not hasten to expel the poison? Watch the phosphoric splendors of an empire's corruption; see every man striving to become a courtier, and the court attracting to its own pleasures or personal ends, the arts that were meant to decorate, and the skill that should have informed, the entire being of society, high and low; or else, like a student who works his brain until the hands and feet lose all power, concentrates to itself the vigor that should have been displayed at the extremities. Britain lost the finest half of her American possessions, and learned in time, though slowly, a truer colonial policy. But there have been two empires in modern times which have fallen in irremediable collapse before the influences of two different sorts of Centralization; the evils of each of which have been long combined in our own Government of India. Let us examine 1st.—The break-up of the Bourbon monarchy in France. 2nd. The fall of the Mogul empire in India during the same period; and 3rd. Should any reader follow so far, he will be in a position to form his own application to our own present difficulties; and if he should be led to admit that circumstances, apparently diverse, were alike influenced by the abstraction of life from the extremities, and alike ended in the paralysis of life at the heart; it will then be for him to decide whether the administration whereof he is, as the case may be, a spectator, a subject, or a member, has not been jeopardized by like mistakes, and led to the brink of similar disasters. Europe, like India, contains a number of races, not necessarily divided, in the first instance, by the geographical limits *Drummond of Hawthornden. which demark what we are accustomed to consider "nations." There is reason to believe that the continent of Europe was once occupied by beings such as are now known by the name of "Esquimaux," traces of whom are now only to be guessed at in the Cagots, and a few like outcasts. Soon, wave after wave poured in the warlike vagrants of Central Asia, the Pelasgi, the Tyrrheni, the Picts (Pathans) Scots (Scythians) Celts, Cimbri, Saca (Saxons), Goths (Geta or Juts), Teutones, and Huns. Some in one region, some in another, the earlier arrivals dispersed or expelled the aborigines and their successors, then were subjugated by later comers, with whom in process of time, they fused so as to appear themselves autochthonous; till, at last, some fresher hordes, stronger perhaps in wisdom than in numbers, established themselves everywhere as the paramount caste of a particular tract. Thus, precisely what happened once in India, in Egypt, in Canaan, in Greece, and in Italy, seems to have taken place in later (though less minutely recorded times) in France. And thus, the Frankish nobility, a military class exclusive and tolerably numerous, sprang from a conquering stock, and added to the privileges of position and wealth, some advantages which, originating in superiority of blood, are long preserved by superiority of food, lodging, raiment, of education, and traditional pride. This class long was held down the restless Gaulish nation by the very sword with which they may be said to have been entrusted for its defence. The burghers protected themselves as best they could, the rural population were either serfs or or métayers, paying either in labor or in kind every item that could be spared from the absolute necessities of existence, if sure of even these. By one institution alone is the Europe of those dark days distinguished from Asia. It was the Church which protected the poor toiling millions; watched them, and taught them, till the time came, and they were fit for freedom. A priceless service, though bought by the dearest birthright of the served; other protection was not to be had; for this the people paid all liberty, not merely of speech, but of thought. But if the poor man was only permitted to commune with his heavenly Father through the medium of the priest, was there not in the king a more present deity, an earthly parent, less mighty perhaps, but then less jealous or more accessible? This feeling probably produced that loyalty to the person of the monarch, which has cemented in Christendom so many longlived despotisms. In the king* the people saw the enemy of *"Upon the king let us, our lives, our souls, &c. |