rising by any high attainments or distinguished merit beyond a certain rank in the public service-and that rank below what even the veriest dunce of a civil or uncovenanted servant may in the commencement of his career generally attain. Government may admit frankly enough the learning, efficiency, and even good faith of Tung India, but they would not raise him to the rank of exercising this learning, efficiency, and good faith, lest little Johnny or Tommy, now dandling in his mamma's arms, or in the play-ground at home, remain unprovided for in future, and have, Iago-like, to grin

"The lusty Moor hath jumped into my seat!"

And the mercantile communities-both Native and European,-composed for the most part of men who have learnt arithmetic well enough to calculate the highest percentage of profit with the least possible distribution, have the selfishness of Government before them to exclude Young India from rising to their own level of wealth and importance. Thus excluded on all sides, Young India finds his education and intelligence "fust" in subordinate spheres of usefulness, which neither excite his ambition nor feed his intellect. And thus some are

POSITION OF NATIVE YOUTH.

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engaged as schoolmasters, drudging life through in a wearisome and unremunerative task; some are employed as editors, reporters, and writers of pamphlets and books, disseminating Western civilisation, with pockets empty of the last rupee and minds full of the most recent ideas; some manage their own or paternal small farms and estates, with notions formed and matured on state-policy and government; many are bankers and petty dealers of commerce; and many more are sunk in the drudgery of clerkship, plodding through life on a salary of Rs. 50 or 80 a month with heads full of Bacon and conic sections! A position like this is but a temptation to Young India to pervert his education, to misrepresent the Government, if not actually to resist it. As the German proverb runs-"The school is good, the world is bad"; -the school affords an ample field to Young India for the exercise of his natural acumen, but when he is out of it, the world at once blunts it, and this is as doubly heart-rending to him as losing what one has once laboured to acquire and perfect. Had the Native mind been curbed after the fashion of an Austrian or Papal Government, it would have been one thing, and the British Government would have

seemed consistent with the meanness of Native exclusion from posts of emolument and dignity; but after having educated the Young Indian, and then to deny him all exercise of his education, is to inflict a cruel wrong, which is excusable neither on the score of justice and fair dealing nor that of evil consistency. One of the witnesses of the troubles of 1857, in his evidence before the Parliament, stated, "I found it to be a general rule, that where you had an OFFICIAL well educated at our English colleges, and conversant with our English tongue, there you had a friend, upon whom reliance could be placed."* And yet there is a line of complete demarcation established in all British India, as dangerous and demeaning as that in France before the Revolution. We have here, in one sense, the defective position of only two classes, without the intermediate one to serve as a connecting-link between them; it is the recurrence of the old order of patricians and plebeians of the Roman world-English sojourners and even Eurasian members playing the first, and the entire mass of the Indian people the unfortunate other. It was this distinction which proved too dangerous to the Romans to be tolerated longer than barely

* C. Raikes, Judge of the Chief Court of Agra.

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two hundred years; and precipitated the Revolution when France resolved upon its revival. Though Alison, with his shrewd perception, failed to recognise it, it has not the less been seen, that the great feature of the French Revolution was simply that it was a rebellion against class-legislation. It is, however, not to be denied that he half perceived it, when, in the enumeration, in all their enormity, of a host of oppressions, sufficient to have driven even wise men mad, as the proximate causes that precipitated the Revolution, he felt it to be a grievous wrong: "On the one side were 150,000 privileged individuals, on the other the whole body of the French people. All situations of importance in the church, the army, the court, the bench, or diplomacy, were exclusively enjoyed by the former of these classes." Who will deny that this is literally the case in India, where the Natives are shut out from all avenues of prefermentnow open only to the few English adventurers? A system of such transcendant egotism-a system which, in a population of a hundred and fifty millions, reserves all the loaves and fishes of the State for a few thousand favourites of the alien race-does, without doubt, imperatively call for a total reconstruction; and this, if not attend

ed to in time, will, at no very distant date, as History unerringly teaches, give rise to a revolution, the basest enormities of which will be redeemed by its being the struggle only of man against nobleman. But as it is for the present, the most intelligent of the Indians, astutely denied every career, cannot rise from his desk or cutcherry to administer a province, lead an army to a glorious victory, or rivet attention, even when he does not persuade, in a State council. The genius of an Akbar, and the talents of an Abul Fazul or an Anvari, are, under the present levelling system, wrecked in the process of quill-driving, book-keeping, or thief-catching! And Harris, having had the ill luck of being born and bred up under it, commenced as a common clerk on Rs. 10, and culminated as an Assistant Military Auditor!

Well, but what did Harris do, under all the disadvantages of his position? Why, in the first place, he left school, as every man does, and obtained employment at the late Messrs. Tulloh & Co.'s auction-rooms, at Rs. 10 per month. After some time he begged for promotion, and a couple of rupees more were thought quite adequate to his abilities. His wants were yet