In as far as the natives of Bengal and Upper India are alone concerned, we are convinced that all of this cumbrous law-making apparatus is quite superfluous. The existing regulations, with occasional pruning and trimming, would, if fairly enforced and adhered to, amply suffice to meet all of their simple wants. But the natives can no longer be left to themselves. Europeans will intrude, and legislation must therefore be shaped and stretched so as to fit it to the characters of the intruders.
As at present constituted, the magistracy and the police are hardly equal to the control of British-born settlers, half a dozen of whom are more difficult to rule than half a million of natives. There prevails among Englishmen of every grade a notion of the East India Company being a body of a somewhat foreign stamp, to whose servants it is almost degrading for a free-born Britain to be obliged to submit.
The amalgamation of the Queen’s and the Company’s superior tribunals, known at Calcutta as the Supreme, and the Sudder, Courts, would, by coupling the home-bred judges appointed by the Crown with the country-trained nominees of the local government, give a weight to the magistracy acting under this combined authority, and thus fit it for the better discharge of the difficult duty of controlling and correcting the excesses of Englishmen settled in the interior. These settlers often find in the menace of an action or prosecution before a remote and somewhat prejudiced tribunal, a weapon wherewith to combat the immediate power of a functionary, amenable individually to the Queen’s Court in Calcutta, for every act which legal ingenuity can represent to be personal, and so beyond the pale of official protection.
The fusion of the two superior courts will not, in fact, lessen the personal responsibility of the English magistrate; but it will remove an apparent antagonism, calculated to keep alive a spirit of defiance towards the local authority in the breast of many an English settler, the effects of which, as described in the extract above given, from the letter of a Bengal gentleman, are felt by every native with whom he may have any dealings. Much has been written and spoken about the duty of protecting the people of India from being oppressed by the Government and its agents, but few seem to have thought of that more searching tyranny which a few strong-nerved and coarse-minded Englishmen in the interior, invested with power by the possession of land, may exercise over the people among whom they are located, and from whom they are eager to extract the wealth which they long to enjoy in a more congenial climate.
This species of tyranny will of course be most felt among the feeblest, and is, consequently, likely to be more grievous in Bengal than among the hardier population of Upper India. But wherever the Anglo-Saxon goes, he will carry with him his instinctive contempt for tribes of a dusky complexion; and where this is not counteracted by the imposed courtesies of official life, or checked by the presence of a sufficient controlling authority, it will ever be ready to break out in a manner injurious to the interests and feelings of those subject to his power.
Our future rule will, it is evident, become daily more and more European in its tone, and there will consequently be an increasing call upon those engaged in its direction to watch over the conduct of the dominant race, to restrain its arrogance, and to see that the equality announced in the laws does not evaporate in print, but is something real and substantial, to be felt and enjoyed in the ordinary everyday intercourse of life.
If this can be accomplished by legislation, the new Commissions and Councils will not have been created in vain; but if their labours end in merely adding to the existing tomes of benevolent enactments, without effectual provision for their enforcement, then we cannot but fear that our projected measures of improvement, being all of a European character, will add little to the happiness of our subjects on the banks of the Ganges, and be regarded by them merely as ingenious contrivances for extending our own power, and completing their subjugation.
THE SECRET OF STOKE MANOR: A FAMILY HISTORY.
PART III.
CHAPTER IV.—AU CENTRE DU MONDE.
“Oh, Paris! ville pleine de brouillard,