The rule that we have set up in India is so hard and mechanical in its character--it has so entirely failed to strike root in the affections of the natives--that a very brief period of misgovernment suffices to provoke an insurrection. This is occasioned mainly by two causes--the exclusive system on which India is administered, and the absence of all intercommunion (in any true sense of the word) between the ruling and the subject races. It is not too much to say that under the present system every native of ambition, ability, or education, is of necessity a centre of disaffection towards British rule. For within the area of British rule the ascendency of strangers makes him an alien in his native land without scope for his power or hopes for his ambition; and beyond that area the possession of ability awakens the distrust and unconcealed dislike of English officialism. On the other hand, to the great mass of the people, the English official is simply an enigma. Their relations with him are almost exclusively official. The magistrate of a district is little more to them than a piece of machinery possessing powers to kill and tax and imprison. Such pieces of machinery they behold, as Carlyle would say, in endless succession "emerging from the inane," killing and taxing for a time, and then "vanishing again into the inane." But the people know not whence they come, or whither they go; their voices go for nothing in the selection of this human machinery which hold their fortunes in its power. The great administrative mill goes grinding on, impelled by forces of which they have no knowledge; and the people are merely the passive, unresisting grist which is ground up year after year. A truly frightful and unnatural state of things!