quote farther to warrant my asking: what would have been thought, said, or done had any attempt been made to confiscate, or rather usurp, a kingdom in Europe on so scandalously concocted a pretence, as the above-quoted abstract of the proclamation suggests? Doubtless the king had his failings, as all men have. And admitting that Oudh was a broken-down kingdom, ruined by native misrule, did these reasons sufficiently justify the Company in summarily depriving him of his crown?
But in those benighted days — and I am speaking of far more than thirty years ago, mind — India was exclusively locked out from the civilised world, and regarded as a huge “preserve” for the families and friends — whose name was legion — of the East India Company. It was a land in which you might have passed your whole life, and been in blissful ignorance almost all the while of the outer world. There was no such thing there as Public Opinion to checkmate wrongs; no railway or telegraph communication; no means of locomotion, excepting by the barbarous pālke which resembled a huge coffin slung on black poles and borne on men’s shoulders, who, poor wretches, toiled and crept over the country with their living freight like beasts of burden — when, in fact, it took more than a month to accomplish a distance that now takes less than a day, and when a journey to Upper India from Calcutta or Bombay, required as much preparation and time as it does now to undertake a trip round the world; — no Independent Press to boast of. No
