THERE is nothing of splendid achievement in modern times, to surpass the conquests of the English in India. A century ago, their possessions consisted only of the little island of Bombay, obtained from Portugal as the dowry of Charles the Second's wife, and of small commercial factories here and there on the coast, as at Surat, Madras, and Calcutta. Then, the English in Asia were, in profession at least, humble and painstaking traders, anxious but to make good bargains in spices, muslins, and silks. The dissensions, however, of the native Princes of India, soon pointed out to the English the more brilliant and profitable path of conquest, of plunder, and of empire. They could almost always find, either some rebellious governor willing to purchase foreign aid against his sovereign, or some distracted province in whose affairs to intervene; and where these were wanting, it was quite as convenient for them to effect the dethronement of the sovereign himself, by means of some vagabond pretender to the throne, and thus to set up a puppet of their own in his stead. In this way, scrupling at no means either of force or fraud, of cruelty or crime, to accomplish their ends, with courage and policy worthy of the splendid field afforded for the exercise of such qualities, the British in India proceeded to lay the foundations, and rapidly to raise the superstructure of the greatest Empire (save that of the Manchus) on the face of the globe.

True, in the commencement of these conquests, all Europe shuddered with

No. XC.

horror at the recital of the acts of perfidy and atrocity perpetrated by the English in India, and England herself rang with denunciations of the crimes of her Asiatic agents. But England did not the less accept and maintain the conquests made by such means, and every year extend them in the same way. And to the accusing voice of Parliament, the pulpit, and the press, her agents could with justice reply, in the words of Erskine, that it was preposterous to bring to the standard of justice and humanity, the exercise of a dominion founded upon violence and terror; that, if England, from ambition and a lust of dominion, would insist on maintaining despotic rule over distant and hostile nations, and give commission to her viceroys so to govern them as at all events to preserve them and secure their revenues, she could not, with any color of consistency, place herself in the moral chair, and affect to be shocked at the execution of her own orders; that her agents might and must have offended against the rights and privileges of Asiatic government, if they were the faithful deputies of a power which could not maintain itself for a day without trampling upon both; that they might and must have offended against the laws of God and nature, if they were the faithful viceroys of an empire wrested in blood from the people to whom God and nature had given it; that the unhappy people of India, to be governed at all, must be governed with a rod of iron; and that her empire in the East would long since have been lost to Great

Britain, if alternate fraud and force, if civil skill and military prowess, had not united their efforts to support an authority which Heaven never gave, by means which it never could sanction.

England, therefore, elected to adopt and to hold all the conquests made by her people in India, and in so doing sanctioned all the means by which those conquests were made, and were to be maintained. From having a few commercial counters only on the scattered parts of the coast of India, she came to be, first, the steward of the populous provinces of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, under the great Mogul, the legitimate sovereign of the Peninsula; then the absolute mistress of Arcot, the Carnatic, and Mysore; next of the Maharatta states of the Deccan and Concan; and finally, by at length deposing the great Mogul himself, and reducing him to the rank of a mere pensioner, she became the ruler in one form or another, of the whole of the vast Empire of Hindustan, excepting only Sindh and the Punjab. Of these last remaining independant states of the Peninsula, she has recently invaded and conquered Sindh, and is now preparing for the conquest of the Punjab. Thus, in the space of one hundred years, she has gradually extended her power by conquests in India at the average rate of about one million five hundred thousand souls per annum. And what has been the annual cost, in blood-shed and in misery, of this annual forced addition to the members of the subjects of the British Empire? Let the self-righteous declaimers of Exeter-Hall figure up this sum in the intervals of some of their tirades against the United States. Meantime, whilst maintaining in India a standing army, of some two hundred and fifty thousand men, with camp-followers innumerable, and every year fighting battles on the broadest scale of strategy, of carnage, and of devastation, England professes, (in Europe,) to be at peace with all the world; and whilst declaiming, in the loudest terms of indignant innocence and virtue, against the spirit of conquest, the cupidity, the rapacity, and the imperial ambition, now of Napoleon and the French, now of Russia, and now of the United States, she has, at the same time, been engaged in wars of invasion, in conquests, and in territorial acquisi

tions, in the East alone, (to say nothing of the West,) exceeding those of Napoleon, of Russia, and of the United States, combined.

And how are these contradictions of peace in Europe and war in Asia; of pretended regard for the laws of nations on one side of the globe, and of deliberate and open violation of all those laws on the other; of professions of the largest liberty here and of practice of the largest slavery there; of a crusade in favor of human rights in the Atlantic seas, and trampling them under foot in the Indian seas; of an attempted moral proscription of the United States, because two millions of our people are black men, without political and social privileges, when she herself holds as subjects some one hundred millions of black men, and fifty millions of white men, who are equally without political and social privileges,-how, we ask, are all these extraordinary contradictions reconciled? Why, forsooth, we are to accept the paltry fiction, ridiculous if it were not monstrous, that all these wars of ambition, all these acts of oppression, are the deeds, not of England, oh no! she is moderate, unambitious, self denying, without rapacity or cupidity; she violates no laws, she is the pattern of reserve, and the champion of liberty;

that all these wars of ambition in Asia, and acts of oppression, are the deeds of the East India Company.

The United Company of Merchants, trading to the East Indies,' have, indeed, much to answer for, in the face of God and of man, if they alone are answerable for all the blood shed, and all the wrongs committed, by the English in India; and if all the wars waged there, have been waged for no other purpose, than that the blood and tears of so many millions of men and women, may be coined into dividends on the stock of India-House.

But it is not so; and it is time that the world should understand, and should act on the understanding, that, for all the purposes of responsibility, moral and political, England and the East India Company are one and inseparable, and the Company a mere administrative department of the British Government.

Nor can it be alleged that the deeds on which we are commenting, are the deeds of past times only, and times of a laxer morality; for the blood-stained