It was said by “the Duke,” that there is no aristocracy like the aristocracy of colour; and all experience in lands where the races are brought into contact, proves the correctness of the aphorism. During the first thirty years of our ascendancy in India, this most forbidding of our national characteristics was kept in check by the exigencies of our position; and the consequence was, that, notwithstanding all the corruption of the time, we were then individually more popular than we have ever been since. There was so little of what could be called European society then to be met with throughout the country, that Englishmen were drawn into some degree of intimacy with natives, in order to escape from the painful sense of total isolation and solitude. That this intercourse was favourable to morality in the highest sense of the term, is more than we can venture to affirm; each party too often acquired more of the faults than of the virtues of the other. But still, bad as the public and private life of Anglo-Indians was at that period, and however great the corruption that prevailed, these defects in those who ruled were perhaps more tolerable to the governed than the ill-mannered integrity of a succeeding generation. The abuses had probably gone on increasing, and the palliating courtesy most likely diminishing, when a new era was ushered in by the arrival of the first Governor-General of superior rank, in the person of the Marquis Cornwallis. We must refer our readers to Mr Kaye’s pages for a clear description of the state of the Bengal Presidency at the commencement of this the second of the three periods into which we have assumed that its history may be distributed. Our space will not allow of our entering into the controversy about the merits of the system then introduced by Lord Cornwallis and his coadjutors, but we gladly make room for the following picture of the state of the peasantry in Bengal, sketched as we are assured by an eyewitness, in the course of the year 1853.