there are times in which the heat will be inconvenient to the European constitution, and so are there in the great majority of other countries in which Europeans have been settled for the last three centuries. Our author would have this matter settled by an anecdote; but the anecdote must be very good indeed, that can settle the most important question connected with the legislation of above one hundred millions of people. The story refers to Aboo Talib Khan, the only Indian of rank who ever visited England, and whose curious account of his voyage, the reader will find in an English dress. This gentleman returned to India, and was employed in the department of the revenue, in the dreary province of Bundlecund, which lies to the west of the river Jumna. One morning,' says our author, he called upon the judge of the district, with whom his manners (acquired during his residence in England) had placed him upon a more intimate footing than is generally established between the European and Native functionaries in India. * It was at the most sultry season of the year, and while the hot winds were blowing with their utmost fury. Aboo Talib called his English friend to a window, and pointing to the dreary scene without, the arid plain, the lurid atmosphere heavy with dust and breathing intolerable heat, the brown and burning winter (summer?) of a torrid clime, he exclaimed, 'Look at that, Sir! Do you think that God Almighty ever meant this country for an Englishman to reside in?' The reader, we have no doubt, will be surprised to find that the person who here denounced the connexion between Englishmen and India as so unnatural, was himself of the pure blood of the Patans, and that his forefathers, in times not very remote, emigrated from Afghanistan, a mountainous country extending from the 32d to the 40th degree of latitude,-of which the average temperature throughout, is nearly as cold as that of England, and of which the temperature of particular parts, is infinitely colder. Aboo Talib, in short, had been duly naturalized, as Englishmen would be also if their settlement did not militate against the patronage of the East India Company. A great many of the Mohammedan settlers in India are of the same lineage with Aboo Talib, and, although in some cases they have intermarried with Indians, they are, even under such circumstances, still to be distinguished from the latter by their more manly and vigorous frames. Only two degrees further north, than the spot to which the anecdote refers, and within the British possessions, is to be found an extensive colony of the same race and of the pure blood of the Afghans, the Rohillas, who after near 130 years residence in India are little distinguishable, in person or manners, from the inhabitants of the parent country,—a matter which most English sojourners in India have an opportunity

The familiarity implied in the fact of one man calling to another to look out at a window, and making an observation on the weather, does not appear to us to require the apology which our author has given in the text.

of determining for themselves, by comparing them with the merchants of that parent country, who in caravans yearly visit Hindostan. But the inhabitants of still colder countries have settled and colonized in India, such as the Usbeck Tartars of Balk, Bokhara and Turkistan, mountainous regions extending from the 40th to the 50th degree of latitude, and from the nature of their physical geography, greatly colder than England.

:

In

Mr. Robertson and other advocates of the existing order of things in India, will not cast their eyes around and notice what has taken place even in respect to the colonization of the European race, in other warm regions of the earth, during the last 330 years. In Mexico there are 1,200,000 colonists of the European race, a large proportion of them of the pure Spanish blood. Humboldt, who had seen them, declares, that even in the hot plains under the very equator, porters and other day labourers, being genuine creoles, are not inferior, in vigour, health, or length of life, to the same class of men in the plains of Andalusia. In Brazil, which extends from near the equator to the 35th degree of latitude, the settlers of the European race are said to amount to 800,000. our own West India Islands there are 80,000 of the European race, one little island alone containing 16,000 true Barbadians,' priding themselves most particularly upon the purity of their descent. Our American descendants do not find warm climates to disagree with them they have long colonized Georgia which stretches to the thirtieth degree of latitude, and they are now peopling Louisiana, and the Floridas, the one extending to the 30th, and the other to the 25th degree of latitude, and consequently, therefore, five and ten degrees nearer the equator than the northern boundaries of British India. The Russians, a prodigious change for them, have colonized in the warm countries of the Crimea, Astrakan and Georgia. All this experience is lost to such reasoners as we have to combat. They turn away from the view of the wide world, and, with a little microscope of their own fabrication, take a peep at British India-where colonization is rigorously interdicted! reply to the experience of 330 years, a puny child, or an elderly gentleman with an indifferent liver, is through that medium exexhibited to them, just as if puny children and bad livers were not to be found in all countries, where there are puny parents and a due share of intemperance. India, however, according to our opponents, is not America or the West Indies. Certainly not; but it is something better than either. It is, at least like them, part and parcel of the habitable globe, and situated in the same climates. India, to our certain knowledge, has been cleared, peopled, and occupied pretty much as it now is for between two and three thousand years, and, probably has been so for twice as long. It is still more certain that the New World, for the most part, was a wilderness about three centuries ago, when it first began to be colo

In

nized by Europeans, and by far the greater part of it is so down to the present day. A country that has been long occupied and long cleared, is notoriously more healthy than one that has been newly cleared, or is not cleared at all. It is rational on these grounds, to conclude, that India is more healthy than America, and we, in reality, know that it is so. Tropical India, therefore, is a more suitable country for colonization than tropical America, as far as the mere question of salubrity is concerned. The different races of men may, in fact, be acclimated anywhere that there is food for them. All tropical America is, at the present day, more or less peopled by colonies of Europeans; and on the other hand, we have about a million and a half of Negroes from tropical Africa, living, and even thriving, as far as their unhappy state will admit, in the temperate regions of the same continent, from the 30th to the 50th degree of latitude. Man, indeed, is the easiest of all animals to naturalize in strange climates and strange situations, scarcely excepting a hog itself, or a dog, or a crow, or a sparrow, or that amphibious and ambiguous creature a rat, of which, as is well known to naturalists, the most thriving breed in this country is of Indian origin. So much for the interdict of the Almighty, as represented by our author in the character of Aboo Talib Khan.

If India was not made for Englishmen to reside in, for whom then was it made? The inference intended to be drawn, no doubt is, that it was made solely for Hindoos and Monopolists, the one to be ground to powder, and the other to enjoy snug patronage. That it was not exclusively made even for the Hindoos, is attested by the presence of fifteen millions of colonists from Persia and Tartary, for the better part of seven centuries; and if one half of what we have alleged in the course of this short essay be true, it would be an irreverent insinuation against the justice of Providence, to imagine that it was made exclusively for the East India Company.

Our author asks one of his opponents, whether he would 'recommend the repeal of the Act of Parliament, which precludes Englishmen from purchasing or farming lands,' and then borrowing from 'The Edinburgh Review,' for the year 1807, he describes the interdict in question as a measure beyond the reach of Greek and Roman virtue, adding, in the words of the Critic, that the bare mention of an act of such disinterestedness and generosity, (that is, the exclusion by the East India Company of their countrymen from all participation in the soil of India, in order that they might themselves draw on the whole rack rent), struck foreigners, and especially Frenchmen of high distinction,' with astonishment.

We have a few remarks to make upon this high-toned ebullition of our author. First of all, there is no Act of Parliament of the kind he alludes to. The interdict is created by a local, or bye-law of the Honorable East India Company, dictated pretty much in the Oriental Herald, Vol. 22.

D

same spirit as their prohibition to export long-ells to, or to import Tea from, China. Instead of being a measure of disinterestedness, probably no government ever enacted so sweeping and comprehensive a measure of selfishness and mischief, for it is one which interdicts in a manner more complete than any other that could possibly have been framed, the extension of British commerce, the improvement of the soil of India, and the civilization of its inhabitants. As to the astonishment of foreigners, we will venture to assert, that no enlightened foreigner would express any other feeling than astonishment, at the folly and weakness of the British nation, for putting up for a moment, with a law so detrimental at once to the mother country and her colony. The only two literary foreigners of distinction who have given their attention to Indian politics, as far as we know, are Messrs. Say and Sismondi, and, instead of praise of the measure in question, our author will find in their works, strong and repeated deprecation of it, as at once absurd and pernicious.

But now to the Review itself. We beg to say, that the writer who places the patriots of Leadenhall-street above the patriots of ancient Greece and Rome, was himself a hired servant of the patriots in question. The Reviewer, in short, who, according to our author, deprecates, with such force and eloquence,' the abrogation of the bye law of the East India Company, was the late Professor Hamilton, of the Company's college at Hertford; an eminent Sanscrit scholar, no doubt, but one of the keenest and most dexterous opponents, even of the partial measures of liberality pursued in 1813, and which have since been followed by results so triumphant and so confounding to persons of his way of thinking. The same publication, The Edinburgh Review,' contains several Indian reviews by the same writer, and in the same spirit. How they came there, is more than we can pretend to explain, but surely there they are, and side by side with others of a totally opposite character, of course not at all noticed by our author, although in them he will see the very measure advocated, which Professor Hamilton deprecates !

We have only one word more to say on this point. Mr. Robertson complains of the unfairness and injustice of quoting as authority, the Fifth Report of the House of Commons, dated in the year 1810, and here we have him lauding the individual opinion of, to him, an anonymous writer, dated three years earlier; neutralised as it is all the while, by opinions wholly at variance with it, in the very same publication. Does it not occur to this gentleman, that if the facts recorded in the year 1810, belong to the days of our fathers,' the opinions given in 1807, must of necessity belong to the days of our grandfathers;' what right then has he, rejecting the facts of our fathers, to quote in support of his own views, the notions of our grandfathers, or of our grandmothers either ?

We shall conclude this article by a short extract from the historian of British India, on the subject of Colonization, and we do so the more willingly, since its bearing has more particular reference to the department in which our author himself was employed, and which is the especial object of his approbation. 'If it were possible,' says Mr. Mill, for the English government to learn wisdom by experience,-which governments rarely do, it might here, at last, see with regret, some of the effects of that illiberal, cowardly, and short-sighted policy, under which it has taken the most solicitous precautions to prevent the settlement of Englishmen in India; trembling, forsooth, lest Englishmen, if allowed to settle in India, should detest and cast off its yoke! The most experienced persons in the government of India describe, what to them appears the difficulty, almost, or altogether insuperable, of affording protection either to person or property, in that country, without the assistance of persons of the requisite moral and intellectual qualifications, rooted in the country, and distributed over it in every part. They unite in declaring that there is no class in India, who possess these qualifications; that the powers necessary for an efficient police cannot be entrusted to the Zemindars, without ensuring all the evils of a gross and barbarous despotism. And they speak with admiration of the assistance rendered to government, by the gentlemen distributed in every part of England. Is it possible to avoid seeing, and seeing, not acknowledge, the inestimable service which might have been derived, in this great exigency, from a body of English gentlemen ; who if they had been encouraged to settle, as owners of land, and as manufacturers and merchants, would at this time have been distributed in great numbers, in India. Not only would they have possessed the requisite moral and intellectual qualifications-things of inestimable value; they would have possessed other advantages also of the highest importance.'

The passage which we have now quoted, is taken from the first edition of Mr. Mill's work, dated in 1817. In the second edition dated three years later, and after he had been two years in the service of the East India Company, the same language is repeated word for word. In the third edition, dated in 1826, when he had been eight years confidentially employed by the East India Company, in the very line of duty to which the passage refers, and when he had access to every document, public or secret, that could tend to disabuse his judgment, if it had been wrong, we have it once more repeated without alteration. This is surely as good testimony for continued mal-government and perseverance in error, on the part of the East India Company, as could well be adduced; and we must add, that the acuteness and integrity of the witness are as much beyond suspicion, as the excellence of his opportunities are beyond doubt. Mr. Mill is, indeed, the ablest man that has for