"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 hor

rors.

Their 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

allayed by a few sagacious words or courageous acts by influential comrades or resolute European officers. Others marched out against the mutineers as sincerely as Ney against Napoleon, but were as powerless to resist the mysterious and morbid sympathy. Others manfully resisted the contagion when their defection would have been safe to themselves and most formidable to us, but succumbed to the increasing excitement when fortune had changed to our side, when there was every thing to discourage a mutiny, when failure was certain, and terrible retribution obviously and immediately at hand. Others, again, when our case seemed desperate, stood faithfully by our side, fought gallantly against their rebellious comrades, destroyed their own chances of successful mutiny, and then, with incomprehensible folly, turned against us just as our victory was complete. They seem to have "lost their heads" (to use a colloquial but expressive phrase) with the continuance of the excitement, as children and highly nervous people do at an orgie, or an execution, or a battle, or a scene of violence and peril of almost any kind. future, then, we must take into our estimate of the Hindoo character, and our calculation of probable contingencies, this liability to insane panics and unaccountable outbreaks of irrational excitement,-propagated like fire across a prairie. It will seldom arise without cause; but the causes may often be trivial, untraceable, and apparently wholly inadequate to the result. We must govern the Hindoos as a race which, in addition to its normal characteristics, has this very unpleasant one of being subject to accesses of epidemic mania, which may perhaps be guarded against or rendered harmless by judicious arrangements and unsleeping vigilance, but which, when they occur, set reason, habitual feeling, and the strongest and plainest self-interest, altogether at defiance.

In

The second thing which we have learned is the tiger-like ferocity which lies dormant in the Hindoo character, and which the periods of excitement of which we have just spoken will almost certainly develop into life. The hideous love of cruelty, of inflicting pain for the pleasure of beholding agony, of spending actual intellectual effort in contriving unheard-of tortures, is a passion more than any other incomprehensible and abhorrent to our minds. We have heard of something like it in the middle ages: individuals in history have at times appeared affected with similar morbid propensities to evil; superstition, mingled with malignant passion and fostered by absolute power, has brought some Europeans in former days to the very verge of this fiendish degradation. But all such cases have been regarded as monstrous-the nightmare freaks of nature. Above all, we have been accustomed to consider them as altogether belonging to the past,-dreadful and loathsome excrescences of times and stages of humanity long since and for ever passed

away. We have been rudely awakened from this delusion;and perhaps it is one which we ought not so tranquilly to have indulged. The taste for prolonged and gratuitous torture has in many ages and countries been distinctive of Oriental peoples. In India we have many traces of it. Religion there contributes to it. Human sacrifices prevailed there down to a very recent date. The annals of native reigns abound in specimens of elaborate and ingenious inflictions. Torture of many kinds prevails there in certain districts habitually even now. The atrocities of Delhi, Jhansi, and Cawnpore, though they alternately make our blood boil with fury and run cold with horror, were not foreign to the character of their perpetrators. The people of India we believe to be, not savage, but mild in their normal moods. But the bestial and ferocious element, which in all likelihood entered. originally into all human constitutions, has not been with them eradicated by long centuries of civilisation, but only covered over and put to sleep; and excitement brings it forth, as intoxication does that of the Malay. We believe, too, that this passion for shedding blood and inflicting agony is, like the excitement we have spoken of, in a great measure physical and morbid: the first sight or gratification of it arouses a frenzied thirst for more, which is propagated like an epidemic madness. Self-control is, as we all know, the special virtue of culture and training; and the civilisation of the Hindoo, elaborate as it is, is not only essentially vicious, but is only skin-deep. In dealing with him, therefore, it is necessary to bear in mind that he is not altogether a rational being, governed by motives, and amenable to interest and reason, but a creature of impulse, and still half a savage and more than half a child. Now untutored Englishmen can least of all men comprehend and manage characters of this sort.

A third peculiarity of our Asiatic subjects, which especially perplexes and disgusts the average Englishman, is their profound capacity for dissimulation. They have an absolute genius for falsehood. No oaths secure their truth. Not only does their tongue utter the most flagrant and elaborate lie, but they know how to surround it with every colour of probability and confirmation; and the imperturbable countenance, the ready smile, the regulated act, all are called in to aid in the deception. The most cautious and practised diplomatist, the most skilful and experienced judge, are often at fault; and nothing but long experience and special training can fit men to deal with such a vice at all.

There is still another anomaly in the Indian national character, to which Englishmen, fresh from the mother country and accustomed only to strong rude sense which they respect, and to prejudices and tastes which they understand even where they do not share them, find particular difficulty in accommodating them