reign, but to the voice of a community in which their motives and actions can never be fairly appreciated, where they are altogether unknown, and where neither their virtues nor their vices can excite praise or censure, because none among that community are favourably or unfavourably affected by the one or the other. We say, these are only a few of the evils; because a volume might easily be filled with an enumeration of others :-but the mind of the intelligent reader will readily suggest them. Our desire is to see these evils remedied; and we are satisfied that the mode of gradually effecting this, by making all men responsible to the public opinion of the community in which they live, is not only practicable, but unerringly safe and efficacious.

We are as sincere as we are warm in our admiration of the system of confining the legislation of all countries to the countries themselves, and making the people, as much as possible, the source of all power: we are, in fact, advocates, from conviction, of pure representative governments, emanating entirely from the people, and made responsible for the exercise of all trust to those from whom they receive it. To this state, we believe that not only India, but all the countries of the earth, will at last come : and our conviction of this rests on the same basis, as our belief in the progressive establishment of every other science on its highest and most perfect eminence.

We see around us every department of knowledge advancing with rapid strides towards perfection. Chemistry, scarcely known a century since, is now becoming familiar to the humblest of mankind. Political Economy, but lately confined to the manuscripts of the studious and the unread volumes of philosophers who appeared on the earth before the world was ready to receive them, is now taught in public lectures, and understood by "the multitude," though it is still "a sealed book " to many of our nobles and pillars of the state, who have remained stationary, while all the rest of mankind have been advancing in their career. Why, then, should we despair of seeing the science of Government and Legislation brought to the same perfection, and equally well understood by all? Though ranking first in importance to the happiness of man, as giving birth to most of those institutions on which his enjoyments and privations are made chiefly to depend, it has been the last to be taught and understood: and there are consequently more delusions to be dispelled in this branch of human knowlege, than in any other that can be named. The reason is obvious: the "educated classes," as the rich are generally called, are themselves as ignorant as the "uneducated" on this important subject; and while a hundred institutions are scattered through the kingdom, for teaching every other thing desirable to be known, the all-important science of Government and Legislation, by the right or wrong administration of which the happiness or

misery of the many is chiefly determined, is left untaught and unattained. In every other pursuit, except this, men have been allowed to make experiments, and lay up a large stock of information from their own discoveries. In discussions on public affairs they have been perpetually restrained; and this has been well remarked, by an acute observer, as a reason why such extreme ignorance does and still must prevail, till more enlarged limits are granted to the exercise of men's faculties in this respect.

"Politics, as a science," says this writer, "having very seldom been permitted to men freely to study, and to publish the result of their researches in, proportionate advances have not been made in it with the advances made in most other sciences. Where truth has not been permitted freely to be published, in any given science, it would be folly to expect a people should have made great advances in it. This deficiency of knowledge is not to be attributed to any natural defect in individuals, or to any superior difficulty in the subject: the established system of education (in England) affords no instruction on the matters in question. Neither the children of the lower, nor of the higher orders, are instructed in these matters while at school, nor young men at the Universities. In the more advanced periods of life, the majority of persons are content to think they have nothing further to learn; and even for those, whose superior understandings urge them to the continued pursuit of knowledge, there are but few sources of information generally known and of established repute, for the matters in question."*

That the Universities, which are professedly intended for the education of our Legislators and their children, should, even up to the present day, be entirely deficient in the means of teaching the only science which it is important for statesmen to know-we mean the science of Government,-is an absurdity not easy to be paralleled. But that it should not be taught in every school in the kingdom, ought equally to excite astonishment. There is only one dignity, and one occupation, to which every man in England may aspire, and to which every man, however humble his origin, however slender his talents, however limited his means, may hope to arrive :-it is that of taking some part in conducting the business of government, from acting as the administrator of the existing laws, in the capacity of a juryman, or an officer of court, to sitting in the parliament of his country, and becoming a repealer of old and a framer of new laws, for others to carry into execu

A Treatise on the Offence of Libel, with a Disquisition on the right, benefits, and proper boundaries of Political Discussion. By John George, of the Middle Temple, Special Pleader. 8vo. London, published by Taylor and Hessey, 1812. We have given the title at length, to direct the attention of our Indian readers to the excellent treatise, from which we may probably draw largely on some future occasion.

tion. Every man cannot aspire to be a naval or military commander, or to take the lead in the learned and liberal professions, as a physician, a bishop, or a judge: but every man may become a Legislator, be his profession in life what it may-sailor, soldier, doctor, lawyer, merchant, and even mechanic :-yet, the science of Legislation, which all should know, is not taught to any class, whether high or low, in our Universities or our schools!* Is it then to be wondered at, that a subject, on which no labour is bestowed, should be so imperfectly understood?

The reproach with respect to the absence of all sources of information on these subjects, of known and established repute, has, however, though but of late years, begun to be wiped away. The invaluable labours of the profound and philosophic Bentham, the masterly treatises in the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, understood to be from the powerful pen of Mr. Mill, the historian of British India, contain more of sound knowledge on the science of Government, than is to be met with in the books of all the philosophers that ever preceded them. The works of the former are a rich mine of intellectual treasure, which the industry of posterity will turn to better account than the present generation. Mr. Bentham is, indeed, one of those rare beings who appear but seldom on the stage of life, and have to encounter an array of prejudices against them, because they live in an age not yet far enough advanced in the knowledge of the particular sciences taught by them, to appreciate their worth. Ordinary minds," says the writer from whom we have quoted before, 66 may comprehend matters less obvious; and capacities one degree larger may take in matters which may be deemed intricate; and so on, till we arrive at the highest standard of minds which are commonly found in the earth: for now and then it happens that God gives the world a man of a sagacity superior to all his contemporaries; of a sagacity which can penetrate far beyond all others into the deeper recesses of knowledge." Newton, Bacon, and Locke, are acknowledged by all to have been of this order. Shakespeare and Milton are so considered by others; and we doubt not that when the lapse of time shall have softened down the hostility to which all living writers who oppose existing errors, must be subject, the names of Bentham, Mill, and Ricardo will be enrolled among the number of the illustrious dead.

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To the minds of such men as these, maxims that will be regarded as truisms in another century, but which are quite incomprehensible to the mass of the present generation, appear in all the force

We must make one exception. In the excellent school of Mr. Hill, at Hazelwood, near Birmingham, not only is the theory of Legislation and Government taught; but the students have the best possible opportunity of becoming thoroughly acquainted with all the merits and defects of the existing system, by seeing it in practice among themselves.

of the clearest conviction. The institutions favourable to freedom, and the privileges which should be enjoyed by the subjects of all well-governed states, the mention of which fills the minds of ordinary men with terror and alarm, appear to them, as they will appear to our posterity, as clearly as the sun in the firmament, and cause them to marvel at our ignorance, as we do now at the wisdom of our ancestors. In temporal as well as spiritual matters, the multitude behold things "as through a glass darkly," and, like men of defective vision, they doubt and even dispute the na-, ture and existence of what they cannot perceive or comprehend, merely because their intellectual organs are less powerful than those of the "shining lights," whom they can decry, though they cannot pierce the veil by which their superior knowledge is shrouded from their weak and erring sight.

To the great mass of the British community, it will, for these reasons, no doubt still appear,-that India is a well-governed country-that it would be dangerous to introduce knowledge or permit discussion on political questions among its people that its rulers ought not to be responsible to public opinion there-but that, though England is many thousand miles distant, and the utmost indifference prevails throughout all classes of its inhabitants, as to the good or evil that is happening in their remote possessions, yet that a responsibility to public opinion in this country is quite sufficient to operate as a check on the misconduct of rulers in that. It will appear of no importance in their estimation, that owing to the absence of all public discussion there, we cannot even get at a knowledge of the facts of such misdeeds, except through the information of the parties exercising the power, and consequently interested in practising deception; nor will it weigh a feather with them to know that even could we get the facts, public opinion will not be pronounced upon them here, where no class is sufficiently interested in the matter to command the sympathies of the rest. It is enough that the system is considered, by the few who profit by its defects, to "work well,"-though it entails misery and suffering without end on the many. It is enough that it has been; and this is the strongest argument that such minds can comprehend as a reason why it should still continue to be. It is of no consequence that ignorance, and suffering, and crime, have desolated the fairest portions of the Eastern world, and keep even the still inhabited portions in the lowest stage of civilizationthings have prospered (as they contend) under all these circumstances, and therefore they are still to remain unaltered. If the justice of this decision be admitted, then human sacrifices, murder, incest, rapine, violence, perjury, cruelty and oppression, might still be suffered to continue ad infinitum, under the "countenance and protection" of British power, and British influence, rather than disturb the self-love, and humble the vain pretensions, of some

half-dozen Secretaries, a Governor General, and (oh! more monstrous than all) a British Judge upon the bench, who might take it upon themselves to violate the laws, by regulations framed to keep millions in ignorance, merely to secure to themselves the privilege of acting as they please with impunity, and shielding themselves from that public scrutiny, to which all innocent and honourable men ought to be, and indeed always are, proud to submit.

*

We have portrayed the evil. Let us look around us for the source from which we may at least hope for good. India is now in a more deplorable state, as it regards the enjoyment of intellectual freedom, than she has ever been since the British flag waved in dominion over her distant hills and plains. We have absolutely retrograded, as far as the existence of securities for good government is a criterion of advance or retreat. We found the country in the possession of a people among whom the utmost freedom of speech and writing on the conduct of their rulers prevailed. We permitted a Free Press among the earliest English settlers, and in the most dangerous times. As our dominion extended, and our power became more consolidated and secured, the despotism of Lord Wellesley imposed a censorship on the Press. A few years afterwards, when our conquests were spread over a still wider range of territory, and no power disputed our supremacy, this censorship (under which some freedom was occasionally enjoyed) gave place, under Lord Hastings, to other restrictions, forbidding any strictures on the public acts of public men connected with the Government at home or abroad, and threatening banishment for any breach of them. An acting Governor General, and an acting Chief Justice, Mr. Adam and Sir Francis Macnaghten, next completed the degradation of the Press, by passing, during their brief and temporary authority, a licensing law more odious than the strictest censorship that ever existed, and fitter for the Inquisition, or the Sublime Porte of the Turks, than for a British settlement; and Lord Amherst has given the final death-blow to even the faint expectation of improvement that was left, by actually suppressing and putting down entirely the only Journal that dared to contend for the rights of Englishmen at the hazard of every thing its projector and conductor had at stake in the world.

Where then is our hope? We have none in the laws of this country for these require impossibilities as to evidence of motive, and the fortunes of plundered provinces to boot, before any pro

"I scruple not to affirm, that the regions over which we rule, down to the arrival of the Europeans in the East, enjoyed a freedom as extensive as any part of Europe, before the invention of the press; for on the only means of circulating knowledge without type, on written books, there was no restriction." See the eloquent speech of Mr. Stavely on the press of India-Oriental Herald, vol. 1. App. p. xii.