cutta Public Library, and he read them all with the enthusiasm of a student, and the reflection of a literateur. His knowledge and learning, now extensive, tended to press its way out, and in 1849 he commenced, with a friend, the Bengal Recorder. That was but the trial. Like every first trial, it failed; and success as a writer was reserved for Harris only in the columns of the Hindoo Patriot, which rose some time after, like the Phoenix of old, out of the ashes of the Recorder. The time was opportune for the starting up of this journal. The Anglo-Indian Government had sunk low: there was nothing more than the policy of aggression, spoliation, and confiscation, characterising their administration. Sattara, Surat, Nagpore, Oude, Tanjore, and the Carnatic were all spoliated, one after another, in the short space of eight years, under the Yankee euphemism of "Annexation." It was a sort of plunder by a public character-by the highest representative of England in the East, in his public capacity; from the bare thought of which he, guided by the influence of the spirit of his Christianity, and that of the moral infantine breeding of his country, would shrink, we are perfectly sure, as a private individual. Lord

POLICY OF THE TIMES.

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Dalhousie (peace to his ashes!) was a selfwilled man; he held the creed in his time that "he," to use his own words, "cannot conceive it possible for any one to dispute the policy of taking advantage of every just opportunity which presents itself, for consolidating the territories that already belong to us, by taking possession of states which may lapse in the midst of them, for thus getting rid of these petty intervening principalities, which may be made a means of annoyance, but which never can, I venture to think, be a source of strength, for adding to the resources of the public treasury, and for extending the uniform application of our system of government to those whose best interests, we believe, will be promoted thereby." This was the key to his lordship's policy of annexation. He thought, perhaps, in his dreamy imagination, that the English rule was a blessing, and that it should at all events be made universal in India; and thus, no scruple of conscience ever turned him with disgust from all barefaced violations of the principles of honesty and good faith; or, if he ever felt a kind of remorse, it was of that fleeting kind of "holy humour," which the Bard of Avon tell us, in his "Richard the Third," of him who annexed

Clarence-it "was wont to hold him but while one could count twenty." Consolidation was the policy, territory the grand object.

"Si possis recte, si non, quocunque modo rem."

And a pursuance of these suicidal State-politics told more on the Indian nation than all the past just and benevolent actions of Government put together, and produced the most pernicious results. The confidence in the good faith and honesty of the British people, so wholesome to the prospects of both nations, was at once destroyed; the remaining Native princes took alarm for the safety of their territory; and the soldiery was roused by passion to make a bold stand against the ruin of their ancient dynasties so that when this all-absorbing but neversatiated ambition lay its hand on Oude, where every family, as Sir James Outram said, had at least one representative in the Bengal army, Government laid the train to that extremity of indignation, which burst forth so terribly in the Rebellion of 1857. Then were committed those atrocities extreme passion and social risings are apt to perpetrate; which, though they have an excuse in history, so lenient in its judgment, shock humanity even at

JUSTICE FOR INDIA!

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this distant hour, and which then blinded the judgment of that most patiently reasoning and practical nation of the British Isles, and shut up, by the enormity of their heinousness, every avenue of their mercy and humanity. Enraged and blinded, the English nation lost their wonted discernment, and confounding the small band of an infuriated soldiery with the mass of a nation, unjustly called aloud for immediate and indiscriminate vengeance against the entire population of India. Harris knew the hour was imperative; he took his stand-point as a fearless champion between the people and the shrieking portion of the English public; all that was noble and all that was little in him now subordinated itself to his grand object: he boldly denounced the annexation-policy, which alone had brought ruin and disaster to Government, set his face vehemently against the bullying opposition and vituperation of the Indian nation, and, exhorting his countrymen to rally round the British banner, triumphantly cried out for Justice to India!

It was about this period that Mr. Norton, of Madras notoriety, wrote his "Rebellion in India," and exposed the vanity of the presumption, on the part of English statesmen

and English writers, of supposing the Natives of this country always view them and their measures with a child-like admiration. He startled England out of her torpor, to see now, with eyes wide open, that a change, past all remedy, had already come over her younger sons (could such a title be vouchsafed to us) of the East, through her unpremeditated, yet Heaven-directed policy; that education was spreading, judgment had been formed, and the standard erected whereby to judge of her course and measures, not with ignorance and fear, as of yore, but with knowledge and reflection. Those who sceptically doubted his revelation were pointed to the tone and dignity of the Hindoo Patriot, which he announced was "written by a Brahmin, with a spirit, a degree of reflection, and acuteness, which would do honour to any journalism in the world." Then came Russell, the special correspondent of the Leviathan Times, to see personally, and to describe graphically, the scenes of the Mutinies; and even he, coming in contact with Harris, was confounded, for a while, whether to applaud the spirit and intelligence of his mind, or the liberality and patriotism of his heart; and after some acquaintance, but much hesitation, vouchsafed to style