selves: we refer to the singular admixture of subtlety and folly which pervades both the conversation and the conduct of the cultivated Hindoo. In no work on India that we have seen does this peculiarity come out so clearly as in Colonel Sleeman's amusing Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official. The accounts of his discussions and consultations with ministers, princes, and pundits, are, in this point of view, exceedingly instructive. Few people display so much ingenuity and skill in argument; but the premises on which they argue indicate an ignorance and a credulity almost approaching to idiocy. The things they believe, and the things they assume, would disgrace the darkest and nakedest savages of Africa; but the dialectic shrewdness with which they will often handle these materials in controversy would challenge the admiration of the most finished intellect of Europe. Then, too, their beliefs, and what we may call their ecclesiastical ordinances, pervade and regulate every hour and every action of their daily life to a degree not paralleled by any other people; so that these consummately nonsensical premises on which they reason so acutely are always and every where in operation. Thus the Englishman who goes out to perform his part in the government of Hindostan finds himself at every step in collision with prejudices which he must despise, and yet is compelled to respect;-which he is obliged to treat with deference and forbearance, because they are the inveterate prejudices of millions, to whom they are real as the air they breathe, and as sacred as the life they cherish; and yet which in his heart he must regard with a sort of abhorrent contempt, as the very incarnation and extreme of ludicrous and sometimes loathsome nonsense. Now here is a discipline which all who know the naturally narrow and intolerant character of the British mind, will admit requires a very special preparation to attain. We are not originally or habitually, to say the least, tender or respective to alien follies and to superstitions and fancies which are not our own; yet in India we are compelled to be so under peril of our empire. A body of competent and respectable Englishmen, such as shine in vestries and town-councils, and prose and vote with no contemptible success in Parliament, would set India in a blaze before they had administered its affairs for six weeks.

Finally, India, both Hindoo and Mahometan, has its own peculiar codes, civil and criminal, by which it has governed for centuries; which are comprehended by its people, and blended and intertwisted with all the concerns of life; which it would be the height of tyranny to supersede by our own unsuitable and complicated forms; and which require long and careful study to understand and to administer. If there were no other reason why India must be governed by a specially selected and elaborately trained body of officials, this alone would suffice.

In no portion of our empire has British policy been remarkable for a uniform and consistent character. Our national peculiarities and our national institutions have both contributed to this negative result. In every thing-in politics more even than in most things-we are empiric, tentative, and unscientific. Our want of science and of system sends us too far into one extreme; our practical good sense shows us our error, and drives us back in the opposite direction. As a nation, too, we are remarkable for a perilous mental defect:-we take up ideas in turn, and not in combination; so that at one epoch we are governed by one set of notions and intent upon one set of objects, and at another we are on a wholly different tack. Neither have we, like some despotic nations, the advantage of being governed by statesmen of commanding minds, who arise from one class and bequeath their science to successors,-by Richelieus, Sullys, and Ximenes. Our statesmen are the growth or the accident of Parliament, as Parliament is the varying product of a growing and oscillating popular opinion. A steady and unswerving policy,-a policy at once clear in its principles, unchanging in its ultimate purposes, and persistent in the means by which those purposes are worked out, has ever been a desideratum to Great Britain, both at home and abroad. Yet a policy of this character is absolutely essential to us in dealing with India. Without it we shall throw away our great advantages; without it that anomalous empire will be perpetually jeopardised; without it we shall lose the respect of that astute and observant people; without it there will occur interregna of vacillation which ambitious native princes may turn to terrible account.

With such a policy-with ordinary skill superadded to our extraordinary energies-with average administrative sagacity, aided by the ample experience we have now acquired, there is no reason, moral or material, why we should not retain our Indian empire for all time. We believe that we are under a solemn obligation to retain it. No one can doubt that our sway, with all its acknowledged defects and all its unfinished excellences, is a blessing to the Hindostanees. It is not positively good perhaps, but it is the best they ever had. By activity in developing it, and wisdom in adapting it, it is in our power to render it better than the best they ever dreamed of. The future of hundreds of millions-their material welfare, their moral progress-depend upon the continuance of our power, and upon the principles which shall henceforth govern our administration. No native princes ever did or ever can, in comparison with ourselves, either protect them from robbers, abstain from oppression, develop the resources of the soil, exonerate them from the nightmare of a filthy superstition, prepare them for a purer morality, or guide

them in a better way. On every principle of justice and philanthropy we are bound to stay where we are.

Nor is there any real difficulty in doing so, now that we are warned, now that we are compelled thoroughly to understand our position and deliberately to settle our proceedings. The reasons are well explained by Mr. Cameron :

"I believe that no people ever existed on the face of the earth to whom the imperial rule of a foreign nation has been, as such, so little distasteful as it is to the inhabitants of India. Among the Hindoos, and the aboriginal races who have imbibed Hindoo principles, the system of caste must have prevented the growth of that predilection which elsewhere commonly arises in men's minds in favour of a national government. That singular system was calculated to engender a complete indifference in the subject multitude as to who might be exercising over them the powers of government; provided only that the persons placed in that position confined themselves within those limits which are recognised in the system itself. Every one intrusted the care of public affairs to the hereditary Chetrya, just as he intrusted the care of his beard to the hereditary barber.

Probably when foreign conquest came, the subject castes, brought up in those principles, would not feel that any injury had been done to themselves; though they might have admitted that the ruling caste had been injuriously thrust out, and had consequently just ground of complaint against the foreign conqueror. There is evidence as old as Strabo, and as recent as Colonel Sleeman, to prove that the cultivators of the soil, that is, the great mass of the Hindoo people, are, to say the least, more indifferent than the inhabitants of any other region, not as to the manner in which, but as to the hands by which, the powers of government are exercised over them. According to Strabo, it frequently happened that the hereditary soldiers were drawn up in battlearray, and engaged in actual conflict with the enemy, while the hereditary husbandmen, whom the system confined entirely to their own agricultural function, were securely ploughing and digging in the same place and at the same time. It was no affair of theirs which body of Chetryas might gain the victory, and afterwards exercise the powers of government. Their business was to till the earth, and to pay the government share of the produce to those who might happen to be conquerors.

Colonel Sleeman, whose abilities, and whose opportunities of studying the native character, are well known to every one interested in the welfare of India, has the following passage: 'It is a singular fact, that the peasantry, and I may say the landed interest of the country generally, have never been the friends of any existing government, have never considered their interests and that of their government the same, and consequently have never felt any desire for its success or its duration.'

The truth evidently is, that the governing caste, though born in the same country as the men engaged in tilling the soil, have always been aliens in relation to them. I do not mean that the governing caste

have always oppressed their subjects. I mean only that, as regards sympathy and the charities of life, they have been foreigners to the great mass of the people. A true imperial government, though foreign in blood, cannot be considered so foreign in feeling and interest to the races over whom its sway may extend as the ruling caste of Hindoos was to the castes excluded from participation in the government. . . .

The men to whom British dominion is really an object of dislike are the great men, who, supported by many followers, might have hoped, in the scramble for power which was going on when we established our rule, and which would probably still be going on if we had not intervened, to have retained or acquired sovereignties of greater or less extent. But these are men who have not any common purpose. They may all wish to overthrow us, but for different and inconsistent objects. And even if they had a common purpose, their education and habits disable them from combining together for the accomplishment of it. No one of them desires to be the vassal of any other of them. I believe that if every native of India who could dream of aspiring to the sceptre of an Indian empire were asked who, next to himself, he would consider most fit to exercise imperial power over the natives of the peninsula, he would answer, 'Queen Victoria,' if he knows there is a Queen Victoria; if not, 'The East India Company.'

It must not be forgotten either, that in India we govern, not one homogeneous nation, but a large assemblage of different [and hostile] nations. The Bengali race might, even in the highest stage of civilisation, desire to be governed by a Bengali rather than by a British prince. The same may be said of the Tamil, of the Mahratta, of the Hindi, of the Mogul, and of the Seikh races. But there is not the shadow of a reason for supposing that the Bengalis would wish to take the chance of an imperial Seikh or Mogul government proving more disinterested and philanthropic than an imperial British government."

It is probable too that, as regards the safe and efficient composition of our native army, India affords us facilities such as no other country ever offered to its foreign conquerors; facilities of which the warnings and experience we have had will enable us to take full advantage. We have to deal, not with one united people, but with many uncongenial ones; with nations among which no combination can be more than temporary and superficial; with tribes, a large proportion of which are warlike, amenable to discipline, trained to military fidelity; and, above all, with a variety of races differing from each other in religion, in caste, in origin, in habits, full of mutually inimical traditions, and for generations accustomed to make war upon each other, to burn each other's villages, to ravage each other's fields. We have high-caste men, low-caste men, and men of no caste at all; Mahometans and Hindoos; Sikhs, Ghoorkas, and Mahrattas; in a word, we have such a vast range of excellent and safe materials to choose among, that it seems a strange fatality indeed that has hitherto induced us to compose

the chief portion of our Bengal army of men of one locality, of one clan, and of one caste,-and that caste too the most troublesome and dangerous of all. We think there can be no doubt that by a judicious selection from the rich materials ready to our hand, by never recruiting largely or exclusively from one district, by never permitting pleas of caste to interfere with obedience or military discipline, by declining the service of all highcaste men who will not submit to this condition, by retaining the artillery and the fortified places entirely in European hands, and by a variety of arrangements which practical sagacity will dictate, but on which we cannot venture to pronounce dogmatically, such, probably, as reducing the amount of the regular force, and replacing it by an efficiently organised police, and modifying the system of promotion both among native and European officers, we may succeed in reconstituting an Indian army which shall at once yield us better service, cause us less anxiety, and involve us in less expense, than that which has just broken to pieces in our hands. Of one thing we feel quite convinced, and the terrible catastrophe we have witnessed has in no degree shaken our conviction,-a native army we must have. We shall need it as a measure of security, as well as for the sake of economy. Not only are native troops better adapted to the climate, and able to move more rapidly than Europeans; not only are they far cheaper; not only does their employment enable us to flaunt less offensively and incessantly in the faces of the Hindoos the fact of their subjection to a foreign conqueror; but their enrolment is simply necessary in order to absorb those turbulent and adventurous spirits which abound in every land, but which absolutely swarm in a country like India, where for centuries predatory warfare has been the life-long occupation of all the more energetic races.* *

Our position in Hindostan, then, we consider to be one full of ample means, and golden opportunities, and rare facilities; but in order to develop all these advantages as they deserve, that uniformity and persistency of political action of which we have just spoken is especially indispensable. It will not do to proceed now upon the principle of maintaining, and now upon the principle of absorbing, the native states; now of encouraging, and now of eschewing, native agency; now of humouring, and now of disregarding, the native prejudices. We must govern India by means of men who are not only trained to the art of government, but who are guided by fixed principles, and devoted to steady aims. Now hitherto, although from time to time our policy even in India has wavered and undergone many modi

* In Colonel Sleeman's work (ii. p. 83) will be found a striking exemplification and confirmation of these remarks.