1830.] Affairs of British India. 71 



glishmen that embarks in any enterprise. So has every British general 

 from Richard the lion-hearted to Arthur the stoney-jhearted ; so have 

 our descendants in North America ; so did our early circumnavigators ; 

 so did Messrs. Peel and Arkwright. The proprietors of India stock 

 could hardly be expected to fight Tippoo Saib or the Mahrattas in per- 

 son ; to form at the same time component parts of a general court, and 

 to officiate as magistrates at Meerut or Allahabad, or as adjutants of 

 their two hundred regiments of Sepoys ; to man their pilot- vessels at 

 the mouth of the Ganges, or to serve out the medicines at their dis- 

 pensary in Calcutta. Yet unless it be supposed, that rulers, to deserve 

 praise, are bound to perform every function of government for them- 

 selves, without the interposition of any agency, we can see no plausible 

 reason why the glorious and beneficial acts and measures of their de- 

 pendent and responsible servants should not be carried to the credit of 

 the Company. 



Where evil can be predicated, our reformers are far too generous to 

 lay an unequal portion of the burthen upon the shoulders of either party, 

 by contradistinguishing the acts of the Company from those of their ser- 

 vants. On such occasions, the utmost care is taken to couple them 

 closely together. " It is the East India Company and their own ser- 

 vants/' says Mr. Rickards, " armed as they are with power and instiga- 

 ted by jealousy, who have from the earliest times to the present hour, 

 been involved in quarrel, disturbance, and war, with the natives of India ; 

 and who, to guard their own privileges, ascribe to others the outrages 

 and disorders of which they themselves 'have been most guilty."* In 

 like manner, the whole tenor of Mr. Crawfurd's Essay upon the " Free 

 Trade and Colonization of India," is coloured by the assumption, that the 

 Company, the local Government, and its agents, go hand in hand in their 

 hostility " towards all the private enterprises of British subjects," and 

 an anxious desire and constant effort to repress and destroy every germ 

 or principle of improvement by which the condition of their subjects 

 might be bettered. The theory, therefore, which these and other name- 

 less writers profess to hold, and which the " Dii minorum gentium," 

 their Neophytes, implicitly believe, (upon the principle laid down in 

 our first paper upon this subject, " quia non intelligunt,") appears to be 

 this : the Genius of Britain is the Ormusd of India, whilst the Company 

 enacts the part of Ahriman, the great first cause of evil, to baffle and 

 counteract all the good offices which its disinterested antagonist is earn- 

 estly endeavouring to perform. Mr. Buckingham is supposed to be the 

 incarnation of Ormusd. 



Such are the fallacies of which the adversaries of the Company have 

 made the most liberal use ; and those who will take the trouble to analyse 

 their writings, will not fail to detect them lurking in every argument, and 

 colouring every statement, 



" Taking all shapes, and bearing many names." 



Examples may be found, "as plenty as blackberries," in the pages of the 

 Oriental Herald ; and those Franklins of literature, who may be bold and 

 resolute enough to force their weary way through Mr. Rickards' volumi- 

 nous Essays, will stumble upon them at every step. Whenever Mr. Craw- 

 furd so far forgets the dictates of prudence as to turn from the details of 

 commerce, which he does understand, to treat upon the government of 



* Page 81. 



