undertaken in the government of India, its problems, its difficulties, its frightful risks. They will show the liability of great aggregates of ignorant folk to groundless panic, the recklessness which such panics induce, their unexpected and inexplicable effect on the conduct of individuals or communities which suddenly become proof alike against the demonstrations of logic, the teaching of experience, even the strong sway of life-long usage. They will show how small is the insight into men's temper and conduct which the best skill and experience can achieve in the case of races whose hereditary temperaments and beliefs differ essentially from our own, and who unconsciously shroud their real feelings in impenetrable reserve. Now that a generation has passed away and the subsiding dust of contemporary controversy has given place to a clearer atmosphere, some principles of statesmanship stand out distinctly as established by the events of the Mutiny. It was a tremendous lesson. It strained our resources at home; it weakened our position in Europe; it imperilled the very fabric of our Indian rule. It was written in blood, in tears, in a vast aggregate of human sorrow and suffering. Its stern truths were branded, as it were, with a hot iron upon the national conscience. It is well that the English nation — which, amid the excitements of popular government, is apt to be indifferent to remote dangers, and the causes which produce them — should lay those truths to heart.
The history of the government of dependencies, a
