suffering from the bad, or deriving advantage from the good quality, we take no care to discriminate, but give praise or blame according to the religious and moral dispensation we live under in Europe. The tendency of this want of discrimination is adverse to Indian progress. The people are at this moment undergoing, but more slowly, the change which revolutionised the West; although this time Mohammed goes to the mountain, since the mountain does not come to Mohammed. Europe flings itself upon Asia, and Western knowledge ferments in the inert mass of Eastern ignorance. We are numerically few, however, though intellectually powerful; and it is of the utmost consequence that we should comprehend clearly what we are about, so that our efforts towards the advancement of those we have taken forcibly under our tutelage should proceed in the right direction. We have been led into these reflections by a very slight matter--a little book, as coarse, vulgar, and tasteless as can well be imagined; which professes to be the revelations of an orderly, or police subordinate, attached to an Anglo-Indian provincial court.[1] According to this authority, all India would appear to be one bloated mass of crime and tumult, and the calm and beautiful pictures of such writers as Sleeman would therefore require to be set down as impudent fabrications. But we do not look for an account of English manners in the Newgate Calendar; and the native scribe who in this little book withdraws the curtain from the mysteries of Indian police may be thanked for his contribution, partial as it is, to our knowledge of the country. In fact it is impossible to talk with too much reprobation of the police system of India. In venality and oppression it was never surpassed even by the most corrupt nations either of the East or the West, either in ancient or modern times. The reason is, that an effective police must be spread like a network over the whole country, and the Europeans are far too few for reasonable superintendence. Old abuses thus remain unchecked, and vast multitudes of hereditary scoundrels combine to cheat their superiors and oppress the people. The police, in fact, are the objects of universal dread; and numberless crimes escape unpunished, and even unexposed, because their victims will rather suffer than invoke such fatal assistance.