Again in 1818, in a letter to Lord Hastings, he says: 'Our Government will always be respected from the influence of our military power, but it will never be popular while it offers no employment to the natives that can stimulate the ambition of the better class of them. Foreign conquerors have treated the natives with violence and often with great cruelty, but none has treated them with so much scorn as we; none has stigmatised the whole people as unworthy of trust, as incapable of honesty, and as fit to be employed only when we cannot do without them. It seems to be not only ungenerous, but impolitic, to debase the character of a people fallen under our dominion.' Again in 1824: 'With what grace can we talk of our paternal government if we exclude them from every important office, and say, as we did till very lately, that in a country containing 150,000,000 of inhabitants no man but a European shall be trusted with so much authority as to order the punishment of a single stroke of a rattan? Such an interdiction is to pass a sentence of degradation on a whole people for which no benefit can ever compensate. There is no instance in the world of so humiliating a sentence having ever been passed upon any nation....' 'The advocates of improvement do not seem to have perceived the great springs on which it depends; they propose to place no confidence in the natives, to give them no authority, and to exclude them from office as much as possible; but they are ardent in their zeal for enlightening them by the general diffusion of knowledge. No conceit more wild and absurd than this was ever engendered in the darkest ages, for what is in every age and every country the great stimulus to the pursuit of knowledge, but the prospect of fame, or wealth, or power?' ... 'In proportion as we exclude them, we lose our hold upon them; and were the exclusion entire we should have their hatred in place of their attachment, their feeling would be communicated to the whole population and to the native troops, and would excite a spirit of discontent too powerful for us to subdue or resist....' 'It would' (he says) 'certainly be more desirable that we should be expelled from the country altogether than that the result of our system of government should be made a debasement of a whole people.' The above are wise and weighty words, and it would be well perhaps, even in these days, if more heed were taken of these outspoken opinions of Sir Thomas Munro.