The colour of an object, although really one of its inherent properties, is always modified by the medium through which it is seen; and nothing but care and reflection, or at least lengthened experience, will enable us to correct the error, and trace the actual through the apparent hue. In the same way, the qualities of a people in one stage of civilisation cannot be judged of intuitively by a people in another stage, because they are viewed through an uncongenial medium. The Indians can no more be comprehended at once by Europeans, than Europeans can be comprehended at once by the Indians. Much care will be required to enable the two to arrive even at an approximation to a true understanding of each other. Virtue and vice are not the substantive and unbending terms we commonly imagine them to be. They receive a new meaning, or a new force, in every new form of civilisation; the _lex talionis_ of the ancient Jews, for instance, was abrogated by the more advanced law of Christianity; and we meet with a hundred things in history-- 'Things light or lovely in their acted time'-- which, in the present day, would be considered indications of positive depravity. Few of the heroes of the middle ages would escape hanging or the hulks in the nineteenth century, and fewer still of the heroines would be received in a modern drawing-room! To form a correct estimate of the Indians, we must compare them with other Asiatic nations, and not with the inhabitants of Europe, where the human character received a new and extraordinary development through the collision of different and distant races of mankind. According to the former standard, the Indians are much in advance, which can only be accounted for by the vast extent of their country, and the fluctuating movements of its population, interrupting in some degree what is called the 'permanent' form of civilisation peculiar to Asia. To estimate their moral and social prospects, however, and the moral and social prospects of the Eastern world in general, we must compare them with our own ancestors of a few centuries ago, among whom we shall find quite as much grossness of taste, obtuseness of feeling, tyranny, dishonesty, antagonism of classes, and puerile and debasing superstition. The conflicting views of the Indian character arise simply from the opposite idiosyncrasies of the observers. Colonel Davidson finds theft common, and stigmatises the people with the English name of thieves; while Mr Lindsay, marvelling at the singular fidelity of his servants, ascribes to them the English virtue of honesty. Both are deceived; for these two apparently opposite qualities may, and do, meet in the same individuals, and are therefore not of the nature of the English qualities of the same name. If we encountered such passages in history, we should comprehend the seeming anomaly, and at once refer it to a particular stage of civilisation; but falling in with them in the course of our personal experience, and