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necessarily be more or less autocratic for some time after it has been acquired; and since the rulers are usually compelled to rely for its maintenance at first upon the strength and fidelity of their own countrymen, the chiefs of their civil and military government have almost invariably been imported from abroad. The Moghul emperors appointed men of their own race or creed to their military commands, and to most of their highest civil offices; the British nation has been forced, by similar conditions of political existence, to reserve the upper grades of their Indian administration for Englishmen. But the Moghul government was essentially personal and absolute; and, in fact, no other form of rulership has ever been attempted in a purely Asiatic state. The people have been used to concern themselves only with the question whether a despotism was strong or weak, tolerable or intolerable; for the expedient of improving a government by altering its form has not yet been discovered in Asia; the only remedy, if things went outrageously wrong, has been to change the person. The English rule, therefore, succeeded to an empire of this character, with a centralized authority presiding over different provinces recently conjoined, and a population in promiscuous ethnical variety. But the inhabitants of India have thereby become fellow-citizens with a European nation that has for centuries been working out popular institutions in a totally different atmosphere; in an island sheltered from invasion, in circumstances peculiarly favourable to the evolution of self-government, among a homogeneous people knit