experienced than himself, although, in reality, they are the worst fitted to sit in judgment on any part of a system, in the midst of which they have grown grey.

173. To this view of the state of society and frame of govern ment in India we may add, by way of finish to a very singular and original picture first, That the legislative and executive powers are both in the same hands those of the council, consisting only of four men, of whom two or three are from the civil service of the Company, and one almost always a military man fresh from England. Secondly, That this council is in the habit of corresponding with the judges of its provincial courts on matters more or less connected with their judicial duties; and employs them in commissions of inquiry, political offices, and other matters not strictly judicial, while the highest Company's judge in the country is removable by the local government, without cause assigned, or by the Court of Directors at pleasure. Thirdly, That the judges of the Supreme King's Court, ostensibly set up to protect the people against the government, are not themselves protected against the effects of that government's displeasure as they ought to be by being made irremovable by his Majesty's ministers, at the instance of the Company's government, or of the company of the Board of Control, who are, practically, one and the same. Fourthly, That, in all the Company's dominions there is not an institution independent of the ruling power, nor any admitted right of petition, or of meeting to petition. No corporations no colleges-no privileged orders no constituted bodies in short, of any description, who have the right of addressing the government in the collective form of we!" The system of centralisation, over which Bonaparte boasted, as completing the beau ideal of despotism, is thoroughly realised in India, where the shadow of political or municipal privilege is not to be found in any individual under the government. 74. All this machinery is perfectly well understood among the parties concerned, actual and expectant holders of high office. Is it then very surprising, First, That distant proconsuls should occasionally fall into malversation and injustice themselves, or slide into indolent, if not corrupt, connivance in the crimes of their locusts of native dependents? Secondly, That a fellow-feeling should prevail among the superior grades of the same order of men, "if not to screen actual delinquency, at least to create as little public scandal as possible, for the reputation's sake of the government itself, and still more for that of the order to which all in common belong? Parties interested may, and doubtless will, attempt to raise a cry of libel and calumny in this matter; but it will not be the less undeniably true, First, That any men, or order of men, similarly circumstanced, are likely, in all human probability, to

4

10

yield to similar temptations, and to err exactly as the present civil servants of the Company any are supp are supposed liable to err. Secondly, That no imputation against all its individuals is necessarily contained in general remarks on viciously constituted public bodies; there always have been and always will be great exceptions of the ordinary Thirdly, no body of men ought to be entrusted with yast powers, under circumstances that virtually take vast away, or infinitely enfeeble, responsibility.

cases and maxims difficulty to resist ter

reaching

mag

be

bom yd 175 But the Press seems to be expressly devised for coming into For play in such a case as this of remote lieutenants, each clothed with almost unlimited happiness or misery, in respect to men under his sway, with whom he has few or no sympathies. If the central government wished it ever so much, if it were ever so free from bias towards its servants, and desire of giving the authorities, at home an impression that all goes on well and smoothly abroad-it would not be in its power to exert an efficient and minute mmute super intendence over those remote lieutenancies. Distance, intimida tion, and fear of odium, too often hinder the truth from the metropolis; and, if it darrive there, its quantity and nitude would exceed the powers of any general government to into in detail. But there is a method by which distance may be made to vanish—a moral vicinage of talent and keenness be where none physically exists, to overawe idleness, injustice, favori tism, or peculation by which the arm of government may nerved and elongated-its dim sight strengthened-its dull tympa num quickened. That method is the Press; and there is none other in the wit of man to devise, which shall effectually, and for any length of time, answer the desired purpose. It is for want of that engine which, when free, cannot be cajoled or silenced, that the government, in India, is kept utterly in the dark on the everyb eve of those sudden and violent revolts of provinces, which everyd now and then arise from the oppressions of the "official channels, and the absence of all modes of constitutionally opposing men in power In no country might the Press be such a powerful SAFETY-VALVE as in India. Y-VALY It is folly, or hypocrisy, to say that the denunciations of a free Press should not be anonymous; if its anonymous; it its operations are not so far concealed it loses all its real utility, and becomes only another mode of preferring accusations under attestations which expose the oppressed man, who turns the accuser, to all the persecutions of the accused, or of his brethren; the evil which, by hypothesis, the Press should be set up to remedy. to very Is it then to be inferred that any one of the friends of publicity, and to anonymous discussion, (the only shape in which it can be truly free,) desire to free the Press from responsibility for false

191:

hood or
arguing
part of the question, to assume a free Press to mean the printing
of any thing without liability to punishment, however false, slan-
derous, or malicious; as if any offence against society ought to
escape the visitation of law, because committed through one or
another instrumentality, whether of Press, or speech, or action,
Josy diw bojeḥting

malice? Far from it: but
from it: but it is a favorite mode of

FEITE DE the motives sufficiently obvious to beg that

&c. &c.

76. Few will deny that the libel-law of England, as explained. by judges, is severe enough; so much so, that it would modern extinguish all public writing whatever, but for the attempering given by our juries, even our special ones. Fewer will deny that one of those statutes, which are usually called the Six Acts, (1819,) makes the old law still more severe, by inflicting banishment for a second offence. Yet this severe body of law would be received with thanks and rejoicings, as the Press-code of India, because administered by a jury, even a special one. In exchange for the late illegal violence of revocable licenses, and for the terrible Star Chamber mode of arbitrary banishment by a council of govern ment, but without the trial and defence allowed even in that abhorred tribunal, any code which insured a public trial would be a blessing. Suppose the power of summary banishment for presumed state offences, of great danger and urgency, were taken from the government, and vested in a full bench of the King's Court under the same forms of public hearing, concurrence or rejection, which are at present in use to pass a bye-law on the pros position of government. This would be virtually enabling the authorities in India to take out of the hands of a jury, and vest in those of the judges, all such extreme cases as both executive and judicial power should concur in considering of imminent hazard to the welfare of the state. Such a change would be no small departure from constitutional principles; yet even this would be a blessing, compared with a state of law, or rather lawlessness, where the property and person of every Englishman are placed in the wanton, because irresponsible, hands of government.

W

77. Fenced in by such powers as those of the English libel-law, of 1819, and even (if it must be) with power of moving the King's Court to banish summarily, will not the Indian government, the civil service, and the Company, consider themselves secure against, the terrors of the Press? What can be the meaning of this extraordi nary panic of terror? What the extent and nature of the evil appre hended through the Press, a word which means no more than free intercommunication of thought between man and man? It has been i shown [par. 58 to 61] that in the divided state of society, popula tion and interests in India, all idea of general revolt, under reason.

GA

ably good government, is out of the question. If thew a govern ment were actuated solely by the adherence to the general interest of the greatest number, and not by any particular interests of individuals or classes in the state, it is rigidly demonstrable that it would naturally form the strictest alliance with the Pressy as a firm and fast friend, as the most powerful auxiliary conceivable, in the common cause of promoting good government. It is indeed true, that, in the first instance, individual writers and printers set up in order to their own advantage, in like manner as men pursue any other avocation that benefits the public secondarily, themselves primarily such being the order of nature and society that, in the struggle of individuals, each for his particular profit, the general profit is best wrought out. Hence, if an editor should depart from truth, frequently and wilfully to appearance, or should seemingly give way to private hatred of himself or others, under color of public good, or otherwise dissatisfy the society in which sand by which he lives, it would be a signal to others to invest capital and labor in rival publications: self-interest would keep each alive to the falsehoods and faults of the other, and the general interest and advantage could not but profit by the detection of error and the promulgation of truth.

78. But it is said it would not be SAFE to allow the subjects of a government to print matters "tending to bring it into hatred and contempt." To this may be asked, by way of reply, if the government justly deserves hatred and contempt, ought it not to suffer such treatment? If I am told it ought not, then it will follow that crime should be protected, not merely from punishment by positive infliction, but from punishment by loss of good name; it will follow that a false impression is to be given of such a government, which is thus to derive support in its misconduct from falsehood, instead of being forced to cease meriting "hatred and contempt," that it may by such reformation avoid reproach. Evil is to be done that good may come of it: end sanctifies means! But where is a government to stop a Christian government planted among immoral Hindoos, and talking largely of reforming them where is it to stop if once it begins a career of falsehood and vice, as part of its ordinary ways and means? Did ever any government derive durable strength from such confusion of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood? You cannot hinder every individual from judging of the government as he thinks its acts deserve. You cannot hinder them all from speaking of it to one another; what then is gained by hindering the intercommunication of those evil opinions which, by supposition, (vide supra,) every body entertains? And in whose eyes is the gain obtained, of passing for what you are not? Not in the eyes of those who

already think the evil, and know what you are it must be in the eyes of others, foreigners, that you try to raise a false impression of respectability by keeping back the truth from being written, This, perhaps, is the real explanation of the extraordinary uneasi❤ ness testified on the subject of the Press. The Indian Government and the Company want to deceive England, America, and Europe, ass to the true state of their dominions in the East. It is a remarkable fact that nothing offends a press-censor, in all countries, more than any public allusion to his censorial erasures, and to the suppressions of truths and impressions of falsehood which it is his occupation to create. This is, at least, a consolatory homage which political vice pays to virtue: the false impressions would fail in their effect, if readers were fully apprised of the arts of censorial cookery employed to produce effect. In the last years of Bengal censorship, it was considered the height of contumacy ma lese majesté of the deepest dye, if an unfortunate editor, at a loss for matter to fill the chasms suddenly caused by the censorial pen, studded the gap with eloquent stars. Such are the caprices of despotic power; its objects must not only bear with Fits inflictions, but pretend as if they felt them not!

78. But if the government does not merit hatred and contempt, hand knows that it does not, why should it wince, like the galled jade, under every severe thing that any one may say of it? No good government ever was brought into lasting "contempt or chatred," unless it well deserved to be so; and a ruler, who is strong in conscious integrity, and in the knowledge that he always pursues the greatest good of the greatest number, will smile at the puny efforts of malignity to misrepresent him, assured that the delusion cannot last. But why suppose that the Press would be likely to try to bring into hatred and contempt rulers who did not merit such obloquy? He who prints what is not according to the hopinions and tastes of a large class of readers, will not be read, hor, in a country like India, where there are no struggles of parsties nasvin England, to obtain the conduct of public affairs, and a monopoly of loaves and fishes, will he long pursue the expensive amusement of printing for gratification of private malice. He whose abusive strictures find continued encouragement and patronage from a considerable class, shows by that unquestionable y proof that his censures are not devoid of foundation. The former should be beneath the notice, of a good government, the latter only so far worthy of notice as to draw attention to those evils of which the presence is indicated in the system, by the angry inflammation onthe surface.

79. It is in vain, however, to argue on the reasons assigned by the Indian governments for wishing to stop every press but their