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INDIA'S ESCAPE FROM FRENCH RULE.
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One of India's most intelligent sons, Baboo Bholanauth Chunder, remarks upon this escape of his country from French domination:

“It is well that an end was put to this French State in embryo. The fickle and freakish Frenchman has no genius for consolidating an empire which India wants. If he had stepped into the shoes of the Great Mogul, India would have been brought up in sans-culottism, under a galling chain of gilded despotism. Under French rule the staid Hindoo would have been a strange animal, with many a vagary in his head. How little could their own distractions have allowed Frenchmen the time to look after the welfare of two hundred millions of human beings. Doubtless the French acknowledge, but fail to act up to, the necessity of accommodating the institutions of government to the progress of information.”

He adds, as to the comparative value of the two civilizations which contended for supremacy in his country, “It may be questioned whether there is not more tyranny in France than in India. The conquered Indian is happy to have no bit in his mouth—to speak out his grievances. It is necessary for us to appreciate correctly the character either of the French or of the Russian. If it be the will of Providence to have a yoke upon the neck of our nation, our nation should, in the ripened maturity of its judgment, discriminate, and prefer the yoke of the English to be the least galling. Nothing less than British phlegm, and imperturbability, and constancy, and untiring energy, could have steadily prosecuted the task of consolidating the disjointed masses of India, and casting her into the mold of one compact nation. They want but ‘the high thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy’ to attach us to their rule with a feeling of loyalty that, not merely ‘playing around the head, should come near the heart.’ ”

What the Hindoo mind thinks of its present masters, and of that possible Russian rule of which people outside of India sometimes prognosticate, may be understood from the utterance of such a native journal as “The Som Prukash” which, in its issue for December, 1870, in an article on Russia and England, remarks: “Other nations seem to think that the Indians are disaffected