It is not easy to impart to an American reader a just idea of how far the people of India—nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of them—are from the knowledge of freedom, the appreciation of law, or the rights of constitutional government, as we understand such privileges. One of their own educated men speaks but the simple truth of them when he says:
“The Oriental mind is decidedly wanting in the knowledge of the construction of a civil polity. It has never known, nor attempted to know, any other form of government than despotism. Political science and political reform appear, like the oak and the elm, to be the plants of the soil of Europe and America. Never has any effort been made for their introduction to the plains of Persia or the valley of the Ganges. Though the most important of all branches of human knowledge, politics have never engaged the attention of the people of the East. They have never studied the theory and practice of a constitutional government, never conceived any thing like republicanism, never understood emancipation from political servitude, never known a covenant between the subject and the sovereign. They have never had any patriotism or philanthropy, any common spirit and unity for the public weal, or what it is to govern for the good, not of the fewest, but of the greatest, number.”—Travels of a Hindoo, Vol. II, p. 408.
Progress, preservation of order, the physical and moral well-being of the people, the advance the world has made in humanity—a humanity that is extended even to the inferior animals—they do not understand. They have only just begun to dream about them, and, even for the dream of the blessed day that is dawning, they are (as the evidences which I have furnished show) wholly indebted to the Christianity which has come at last and breathed the thought into their slumbering souls.
