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false, rapacious, and corrupt, to an almost incredible degree; and they seem utterly devoid of consideration for the rights of inferiors and of a sense of public duty. Even Mr. Cameron, who goes further than any other writer in his estimate of what the people may become, and ought to be made, says:

"The judges of all grades should be indiscriminately European and native; but this is a state of things which can only be approached by degrees, and by means of the highest education. I am not at all sure that we have not gone too far in the official employment of natives without preparing them by European training. . . . My anxiety for the improvement of the natives of India does not blind me to the marked distinctions which exist between them in their present moral condition and their European governors; and I think it highly important that such distinctions should not be neglected in constructing institutions for our Eastern possessions. I would not, for example, trust a native with power over his countrymen in any case in which pecuniary considerations do not prevent the employment of a European. Their general contempt for the rights of inferiors, and the abominable spirit of caste, render them very unsafe depositaries of such a trust."

We have, we confess, a very strong conviction of the utter unfitness of the native Hindoos at present for any of the higher functions of administration; and we wish it were possible to supersede them more completely than we have done. That in the course of time, and by sedulous care in their education, they may become fit to assist us in governing their country, we hope and believe; but such is their actual inferiority (moral rather than intellectual) that we can only retain this hope and faith by constant comparison of Englishmen now with their ancestors in the dark ages. That our most energetic exertions should be directed towards preparing the natives for higher and more responsible positions than they can at present occupy with safety, does not, we think, admit of a doubt. Nor do we fear that the permanence of our Indian empire will be endangered thereby. Long before native agency can be so widely employed as to be dangerous, the native character must have been so far modified as to render it secure. By that time the blessings of our rule will have become so widely seen and so fully established, that no native intelligent enough to be employed by us will wish to overthrow us. But we think it should be our rule, only to advance to places of authority and influence such of the Hindoos as have received a European education, have imbibed European notions of morality, have lived enough among Europeans to have become impregnated with that sense of public duty without which no man can be fit to govern others,-such, in a word, as without having been thrown altogether out of harmony with their countrymen, shall have become qualified to guide and to control them. Even now

the ablest, purest, wealthiest, and most sagacious of the Hindoos are conscious that the overthrow of our rule would not only be their ruin, but would be the greatest conceivable misfortune that could befall their country. It rests with ourselves so to act, that all whom we in time have trained to aid us,-all, in a word, whose character, under any régime, would mark them out for influence and sway,-shall entertain the same conviction. "time," however, we mean not a few years only, but more probably a few generations. National peculiarities are not speedily effaced; nor are national vices to be eradicated by any summary process. Meanwhile we recommend to our readers the following wise suggestions:

By

"It is no wish of mine to direct the ambition of the natives solely to official distinction; but you cannot exclude men from administering the affairs of their own country without stigmatising and discouraging them. In addressing the students of these universities eight years ago, I said to them, 'Do not imagine that the sole or the main use of a liberal education is to fit yourselves for the public service; or rather, do not imagine that the public can only be served by the performance of duties in the offices of government.' I am quite ready to repeat that admonition. I strongly desire to see the native youth distinguish themselves in all honourable ways; but I more strongly desire that our colleges should send forth zemindars capable of improving their own estates and the condition of their ryots; natural philosophers capable of collecting and utilising the vast store of undiscovered facts contained in the soil, climate, and productions of their country; moral philosophers capable of studying the peculiarities of the Indian races, and of directing them, by eloquent exhortation, to virtue and happiness, than that these colleges should be nurses of eminent judges and collectors" (Cameron's Address, p. 153).

We have left ourselves no space for lengthened comment on any of the works whose titles we have placed at the head of this article. Nor is it, perhaps, necessary. We may say, however, that no one can carefully study all those works without attaining a very fair acquaintance with Indian interests and the Indian character. The able and judicious pamphlet of Mr. Cameron we have referred to more than once in the course of our remarks. The Letters of Indophilus are believed to proceed from a gentleman who once held a responsible position in India, and now fills one still more important in this country, and they display an unusual intimacy with the whole subject. The Despatch on Education gives a full account of the new plans pursued in India, and inaugurated, we believe, by Sir Charles Wood while at the Board of Control. Col. Sleeman's book is full of entertainment, and throws a flood of light on Indian character and manners. He was political resident at Lucknow before Sir Henry Lawrence. Mr. Pratt's papers are sagacious and valuable; they convey the

deliberate conclusions of a man whose acquaintance with India is not only thorough, but of recent date, and will serve to disperse many errors and illusions. The book of M. de Valbezen is written in an excellent spirit, and abounds in succinct information; and is particularly valuable as containing the estimates and views of an intelligent and competent foreigner.

ART. II.-GEORGE SAND.

Histoire de ma Vie. Par George Sand. Paris, 1855.
Euvres de George Sand. Paris, 1857.

FEW travellers can have crossed the Channel on a fine day, and have reached the point where the coasts of both countries are visible at once, without reflecting how wide and vast are the moral and intellectual differences which separate lands divided by a material barrier so narrow. It is not only that race, religion, language, history, are all different,-for this we should, of course, be prepared; but the whole tone and turn of thought is dissimilar; and whatever efforts are made to attain a superficial harmony, however familiar we become with the languages and literatures of the Continent, we are always separated from the continental nations. Englishmen take much greater pains to understand the manners, traditions, language, and writings of the leading nations beyond the Channel than are expended by the inhabitants of those countries in gaining an acquaintance with us, or with each other. And yet we never cease to seem to them insular. We cannot judge by their standard, or feel with their feelings. There are whole portions of thought in which our minds run in an entirely distinct channel. More especially with regard to those two cardinal points of human society, religion and the relations of the sexes, we seem to think with an irreconcilable difference-our right is not their right, nor their wrong our wrong. They reproach us as much as we reproach them. We talk as if the whole of French fiction was a vast mass of corruption; they shrink from the iron conventionalism of English society, and the coarseness of our public immorality. What we call license, they think the honest obedience to a divine passion. What we consider delicacy of language, they consider the affectation of prudery.

Such a difference pervades national life far too deeply and widely to be referred to any one cause, or reduced under any one head; but we seem, at any rate, to present it to ourselves in a distinct shape when we observe how much greater the influence of society is in England than in France or Germany.

An Englishman has his place in family life, in a locality, in a political system. When he speculates, he never suffers himself to leave the limits of the social sphere. He is content to accept the results of experience, by the acceptance of which practical statesmanship is made possible in a free country. He refers all propositions to the standard of what English institutions will admit. His notions of love and marriage are subordinated to his conception of the exigencies of family life. He wants a religion that will practically work, which real bishops can expound to real public meetings, which will suit the man who desires to be left alone in the bosom of his family, and yet join with his neighbours in occasions of sacred solemnity. But on the Continent there is a large number of persons, especially among those eminent in literature, of whom we may say that each individual seems left to himself. The first principles of every thing are debatable ground to him. He receives aid neither from State nor Church. All that he has to do is to shape his own particular career by reason, by sympathies, by submitting to the teaching of events, by trusting to the protection of that vaguest of deities, le bon Dieu. We cannot abandon our own position, or admit for an instant that things which we fully believe are morally wrong in themselves cease to be wrong because foreigners choose to make light of them. But if we wish to comprehend rather than to condemn, our best road is, by the exercise of what imagination we possess, to throw ourselves into the position assumed by those whom we are criticising, and divesting ourselves of every thing in society and established institutions which shackles or assists us, look on human life with the eyes of a man who has nothing to trust to but the play of his own feelings, the whispers of his own conscience, and the dictates of his own reason.

It is not easy to do this; and after our most honest efforts to understand them, French novels, the most characteristic expression of what we refer to, will remain very different compositions from any that we can fancy ourselves or any of our countrymen to have written. And no writer is at once more typical and more incomprehensible than George Sand. To all the difficulties implied in the fact that she is a French writer of the nineteenth century, we must add those implied in the fact that she is a woman, and what is more, a woman with a philosophical turn of mind. We have no English writer at all resembling her; but we know enough of philosophical ladies generally, to be aware that it requires considerable nicety of perception to distinguish the exact point on which they are speaking, and the precise object which they have in view. Sometimes, in reading George Sand, we might fancy that she had shaped

out a definite system of life and morals for herself, sufficiently ascertained to command her own belief and to become the topic of persuasion to others. Sometimes it seems as if she must be writing for mere writing's sake, meaning nothing, believing nothing, wishing nothing. As a general result, we see that she is possessed with one or two leading ideas. She thinks the world of modern society decidedly wrong on at least two distinct points. Her opinion is clear against the conventional system of marriages, and the established relations of the rich and poor. But when we ask with what she wishes to replace them, we are at sea; we are lost in the beautiful but obscure language of feminine philosophy.

But a person may be vague in thought and language, and yet have a great deal to say, and exercise a great influence by saying it. Every century has stirring within its breast a number of feelings dimly felt, of aspirations imperfectly understood, of desires faintly expressed. It is possible that a writer may acquire a great power by giving utterance to these first flutterings of thought and hope, and may be all the more successful because the utterance has an appropriate feebleness and indistinctness. There is a wide and very vague feeling afloat in the present day that some classes, though it is not known exactly which, have not the fair chance in the world that they ought to have. There is a sort of readiness to take up the cause of sinners, a distrust of respectability, a recoil from the worship of success. Something large and noble seems within the grasp of mortals, if their fellow-men did not step in the way. It is difficult to say that either women or the poor find this the best of all possible worlds. In England, when such a thought arises, we test it by the standard of social institutions. We think whether society does not demand a subordination of sex and rank, and strive to hit on the principles by which this subordination should be regulated and modified. But in a country where problems of thought and morals exist for the individual rather than for society, it is natural to give vent to the sense of injustice without any calculations of expediency, and to believe that there is in man at large that power of quick and radical change which the individual fancies he can recognise in himself. George Sand is one of the prophets who take up this parable, and she has a large number of votaries to sympathise with her.

To this, her primary attraction, she adds others of a secondary but powerful nature. She has a true and a wide appreciation of beauty, a constant command of rich and glowing language, and a considerable faculty of self-analysis and self-reflection. And no one could possess more completely the charm of unreserve. What she thinks she says, without

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