“Where,” says he, “no battles are fought, the ryots remain unmolested by military exactions, and the zemindars are seldom changed, the country was in high cultivation, and the population frequently superior to our own.” Such was the condition and treatment of the natives of Indostan, at the commencement of the present century. In another chapter, on our policy and conduct in this vast and important region—it remains only to take a rapid glance at the effect of these two centuries of despotism upon these subjected millions, and to inquire what we have since been doing towards a better state of things,—more auspicious to them, and honourable to ourselves. CHAPTER XVIII. THE ENGLISH IN INDIA, CONTINUED. We are accustomed to govern India—a country which God never gave us, by means which God will never justify. _Lord Erskine—Speech on Stockdale’s Trial._ We have traced something of the misery which a long course of avarice and despotism has inflicted on the natives of India, but we have not taken into the account its moral effect upon them. Generation after generation of Englishmen flocked over to Indostan, to gather a harvest of wealth, and to return and enjoy it at home. Generation after generation of Indians arose to create this wealth for their temporary visitors, and to sink deeper and deeper themselves into poverty. Happy had it been for them, had poverty and physical wretchedness come alone. But the inevitable concomitant of slavery and destitution appeared with them, and to every succeeding generation in a more appalling form—demoralization, vast as their multitude and dreadful as their condition. They were not more unhappy than they were degraded in spirit and debased in feeling. Ages of virtual though not nominal slavery, beneath Mahomedan and Christian masters, had necessarily done their usual work on the Hindus. They had long ceased to be the gentle, the pure-minded, the merciful Hindus. They had become cruel, thievish, murderous, licentious, as well as blindly superstitious. They had seen no religious purity, no moral integrity practised—how were they to become pure and honest? They had felt only cruelty and injustice—how were they to be anything but cruel and unjust? They had seen from age to age, from day to day, from hour to hour, every sacred tie of blood or honour, every moral obligation, every great and eternal principle of human action violated around them—how were they to reverence such things? How were they to regard them but as solemn and unprofitable mockeries? They were accordingly corrupted into a mean, lying, depraved, and perfidious generation—could the abject tools of a money-scraping race of conquerors be anything else?—was it probable? was it possible? Philosophers and poetical minds, when such, now and then, reached India, were astonished to find, instead of those delicate and spiritual children of Brahma, of whom they had read such delightful accounts—a people so sordid, and in many instances so