CHAPTER XVI.
If the reader should be displeased with the above digression, and censure me for having, at this distance of time, raked up a wretched and cruel past, the best excuse I can offer is that the defunct East India Company has never been (to my knowledge) adequately exposed to public scorn for their iniquitous policy of territorial spoliation in the East. And when we come to reflect that the calamitous consequences which resulted from the Mutiny, were due to their tyrannical and rapacious acts, no words can possibly be too strong for their condemnation.
As an old Anglo-Indian I say, and I challenge contradiction, that, after the annexation of Oudh, the educated natives of Upper India despised and detested the very name of .the so-called “Honourable” East India Company.
And why? Well, as the dethronement of the King of Oudh, and the seizure of his vast and superb possessions, was the last stroke of “annexation business” done by the Company before their extinction, and burial beneath the ruins of a policy they themselves had created for their doom, I will here venture to show (though it may sound egotistical; but why
