Asiatic fellow-subjects are brought so near for the moment that they look almost as large as our own rights and interests.

This year, 1853, then, is the time for those to break silence who have any thing to ask for India before she begins a new cycle of twenty years, and dwindles into an unnoticed speck in the distance.

I am very far from wishing to depreciate the merits of the East India Company. The sternest critic of their government has pronounced the following commendation upon it: —

"I believe it will be found that the Company, during the period of their sovereignty, have done more in behalf of their subjects, have shown more good will towards them, have shown less of a selfish attachment to mischievous powers lodged in their own hands, have displayed a more generous welcome to schemes of improvement, and are more willing to adopt improvements, not only than any other sovereign existing in the same period, but than all other sovereigns taken together upon the face of the globe.”*

I do not hesitate to declare my assent to the correctness of this opinion at the time when its esteemed and lamented author pronounced it.

If I cannot now pronounce the same opinion, if I cannot believe that Mr. Mill would now pronounce the same opinion, it is not because I think that the Company is less enlightened or less benevolent than it was. But because, since the time when the his

* Mill's History of India, vol. vi. p. 286.

torian thus wrote, the Company has had opportunities of displaying much higher qualities than any which their previous position could have called forth, and because, as I sincerely believe and deeply lament, they are throwing those opportunities away.

My charge against the East India Company admits in them all the merit belonging to prudent and well-disposed administrators of the system established before the year 1843, and is founded entirely upon their apparent unwillingness to adopt a system more in accordance with the higher position which they were then invited by Parliament to assume. I do not accuse them of wanting any of the good qualities which we expect from rulers placed in ordinary circumstances, but only of wanting the loftier and more heroic attributes which would have enabled them to comprehend the illustrious part assigned to them in the history of our country

I may say in the history of mankind - and to have raised themselves, not without self-sacrifice, to the height and dignity of the occasion.

The statute of 1833 made the natives of India eligible to all offices under the Company. But during the twenty years that have since elapsed not one of the natives has been appointed to any office except such as they were eligible to before the statute. It is not, however, of this omission that I should feel justified in complaining, if the Company had shown any disposition to make the natives fit, by the highest European education, for admission to their covenanted service. Their dis

position, as far as it can be devised, is of the opposite kind.

When four students were sent to London from the Medical College of Calcutta, under the sanction of Lord Hardinge in Council, to complete their professional education, the Court of Directors expressed their dissatisfaction; and when a plan for establishing a university at Calcutta, which had been prepared by the Council of Education, was recommended to their adoption by Lord Hardinge in Council, they answered that the project was premature. As to the law commission, I am afraid that the Court of Directors have been accustomed to think of it only with the intention of procuring its abolition.

These things it will be readily understood were profoundly discouraging to me. But the reflection that I was endeavouring to carry into effect the intentions of Parliament sustained me.

I found myself, then, in the last five years of my Indian career, with one hand upon the lever of legislation, and the other upon the lever of public instruction; and during the seven previous years I had served an apprenticeship in both those great functions, which had given me some confidence in my own judgment.

It was therefore both natural and quite within the line of my duty, that I should endeavour to frame to myself a distinct notion of the social and political condition into which it should be our object to bring our Indian empire, by the combined forces of legislation and public instruction; the

rather, that Lord Hardinge had, at the period I speak of, broken, beyond all possibility of recovery, the power of the last and most formidable rival that has obstructed the British rule, and consequently the progress of civilisation in India.

Lord Ellenborough has said, in his evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons last session:

"The objection to having a legislative councillor is this, that he always wishes, and it is very natural that he should have that wish, to immortalise his services by making some alteration in the law."

Whether at a future time, when the work of the law commission is accomplished, this may be a valid objection to having a legislative councillor, it is not now worth while to consider. It has hitherto been so far from an objection, that it is the very thing which the legislative member, in combination with the law commission, either as president of that body, or as the person who is called upon to pronounce a judgment upon its propositions, is sent to India to accomplish.

If this is a mistake, it is no mistake of mine, but of the Imperial Parliament.

A mass of evidence was given before the committees in 1832, which seems now to be entirely forgotten; but which proved the law and judicature of British India to be in a state of anomaly and confusion, which, I believe, is wholly unexampled. To remedy this, the law commission was created as a temporary institution.

To remedy this, and afterwards to keep the current legislation of India in accordance with the

system and the principles which the law commission might establish, the fourth member of Council was created as a permanent institution.

I, therefore, not only felt the wish which Lord Ellenborough describes as natural to my position, but I also felt the accomplishment of that wish, as far as in me lay, to be my imperative duty, to be the very consideration for which I was annually receiving large sums of public money.

Lord Ellenborough, when in India, made an objection to the institution of the fourth member of Council, and to the institution of the law commission, similar in some respects, though not in all, to the one I have just noticed. And a similar objection to the law commission had been previously made by Mr. Amos likewise, who was for about four years president of that body. He was made president upon the occasion, or, at least, at the time, of my refusal to communicate to the Council of India the plans of the law commission in their inchoate and immature condition, in such a manner as would have enabled the Council to put a stop to the projects of the law commission before they had been fortified with all the arguments intended to ensure their adoption, and thus to crush the very germs of law-reform,

"Cum nondum tepido maturuit hostis in ovo.”

I replied to these objections of Lord Ellenborough and Mr. Amos at Calcutta, and I need now only quote from those minutes of mine in which, after reciting their objections, I have given what seems to me a complete refutation of them. The minute