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

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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

in what text-book of the law of nations any countenance is given to the English assertion of a right to intervene in the affairs of every territory which happens for the time being to be without an efficient government,' or in what textbook room is left for a mere inclination

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to deny this right. And we suppose the Spectator would incline to deny' the right of England to conclude a fraudulent treaty with the Emirs of Sindh, in the express purpose, as admitted by her agents, of placing a bomb' in the midst of the Emirs to blow them up; for the Spectator proceeds with extreme naivetè to affirm, that The adoption of the puppet Shah Shoojah against Dost Mahommed, whom we had acknowledged, was one of the most impudent and naked lies in the annals of diplomacy;' and then touches the very point, rem acu,-in saying:

'Mr. Thornton seems to have adopted Sir Robert Peel's notion, that political morality is matter of geography; that the laws of right depend upon latitude and longitude; and that in the East Indies they are altogether suspended in favor of the Company'

Aye, that is the evil: the political functions of the East India Company. England is full of great and good men : none greater, none better, are to be found in Christendom. Though British statesmen, British lawyers, and British critics have neglected the study of the law of nations to a degree which it is difficult to conceive of,—so that nearly all they have written on the subject, consists of mere party-pamphlets, and though their chief diplomatic contentions in Europe and America, have been efforts to interpolate in the law of nations new doctrines of blockade, search, capture, and prize, which doctrines England will be the first to deny, on the day, not far distant perhaps, when they come to be applied to her, notwithstanding all this, the British mind is deeply imbued with religious and ethical principles, and with sincere love of fair play at least, if not of abstract right. But the British mind is insular and insulated, and therefore, in all international questions, selfishly and intensely British. And her very government is in the nature of a close corporation which fact has always produced a deleterious influence on the conduct of the British. Other

wise, in past times, she would not have engaged and persevered so long in the war of the Succession, and even exiled Bolingbroke for terminating it by the treaty of Utrecht: of which one of the greatest of modern historians says truly:

the victories of Britain was immense, but "The evil thus done to humanity by the nation did not see it; and even while Germany, and endeavoring to impose on she was riveting the chains of Italy and Spain a sovereign it abhorred, she flattered herself with the idea that she was combatting for liberty; nay, she continued to talk still of the European balance of power, at the very moment when the continuation of the war could have no other effect but to subject all Europe to the odious yoke of Austria." (Sismondi.)

And otherwise, that is, but for the egotism of her public policy, England could never have been ready to plunge into war with Spain, at a more recent period, on so absurd a pretext as that of defending Meares at Nootka Sound, he being an Englishman to be sure, but an adventurer in the service of the Portuguese, commanding a Portuguese merchant ship, fitted out by Portuguese merchants at Macao, and entitled, as against Spain, (in that particular adventure,) to the protection of Portugal alone.

But Great Britain sees what is for her own interest too clearly and strongly to have any distinct perception either of the rights of others or of the wrong involved in the gratification of her own public and private ambition. And when importunate conscience will now and then bring before her mind's eye, the picture of the hecatombs of distant Asiatics slaughtered on the altar of cupidity and lust of power, she hugs herself in the pleasant reflection that all this iniquity is the act of the East India Company. Else how were it possible for her to remember, with still fresh resentment, the sufferings of the one hundred and twenty two Englishmen put to death by the caprice or neglect of Surajee-ud-Dowlah a century ago, and to forget the myriads of Hindus slaughtered with no more of justice or right by herself? Else how were it possible for her to exhibit so much righteous indignation in view of the alleged wrongs inflicted by Russia on Shamyl and his Caucasians, regardless of the far greater and less palliable

wrongs inflicted by her on tne Afghâns? Else how were it possible for her to denounce the razzias of the French in Algiers, when she herself has not yet finished dividing among her troops the plate and jewels plundered from the dethroned Emirs of Sindh and their subjects? Else how were it possible for her to indulge in such transports of (pretended) morality on account of the annexation of Texas to the United States, the most righteously acquired accession of territory, both in form and substance, of which modern history affords any example, because accomplished by the free consent of the people of the smaller state,-how were it possible for England to reproach the United States for imputed lust of dominion, on account of this, at the very moment when she is wresting the Mosquito Shore from Central America, cutting up the troops of Gwalior, seizing on Borneo, preparing to retain Chusan, and about to invade the Punjâb? This extraordinary blindness of Great Britain to the moral quality of her own public acts, this her self-complacent assumption of the functions of a religious missionary in her intercourse with Europe and the United States, would never have existed probably, (it is not conceivable that human effrontery could ever have gone so far,) if the East India Company did not stand between her and all the acts of wanton invasion, of violent conquests, of grasping ambition, and of utter disregard of the rights of men and of nations, which characterize her stupendous career of empire in Asia.

Events have occurred during the last ten years, to produce a great change in the relations of the East India Company to the rest of the world; and these events are not auspicious to the continued immunity of England from public judgment on the acts of the Company. Her great conquests were made at a time when all Christendom was engaged in a common struggle, and when the voice of justice was drowned amid the general din of arms. Since that time, the commercial intercourse of the various nations of the earth, has grown to be more extensive, and more intimate; inquiry into the acts of other countries has come to be more close and rife in each, and men possess a fuller knowledge of passing

incidents. The terrible catastrophe of the first British invasion of Kabul,— that fatal retreat.-the greatest disaster sustained by any army in modern times, except that of the French retreat from Moscow, at once fixed all eyes on British India, and the bloody wars of the East India Company. The war in China, carried on chiefly by troops from India, stimulated still more the public curiosity concerning the proceedings in general, of the English in the East. And, finally, by our having the elementary powers of nature imprisoned in the steam engine,-the Djin, as it were, of Eastern fable, with which the Arabian Nights have rendered us familiar, enslaved by human art, and compelled to submit their omnipotence to the ministration of our wants and pleasures,-and by employing their agency in the propulsion of the ship by sea, and of the car by land, the remotest parts of the globe are brought into rapid intercommunication, and India is now about as near to us, (nearer, indeed, for all the purposes of intelligence, considering that the communication is periodically regular,) as England or France was, at the time of the formation of the Union. We now begin to comprehend, thoroughly, what the East India Company is, and what it has done in the East; and the merchant-conqueror of Hindustan, unmasked, and displayed in his true colors, can no longer act with success the part of Tartuffe.

But, in the more diffused notice which events on the other side of the Atlantic now receive among us, and with our better knowledge of the nature of the East India Company, have we paid due attention to what has been, or yet may be done, by a similar Company in North America?

In the reigns of Elizabeth and of the Stuarts, the whole universe was distributed among various Companies of Adventure. By some of these (or under their nominal authority,) were several of the now United States colonized and established. In all these cases, the colonists brought with them, or assumed here, the powers of political administration; and they became localized at once as political communities or governments. But the Adventurers of the Hudson's Bay Company,' established under a charter of Charles the Sec