PREFACE.
India, the most valuable dependency of the British crown, is also one of the most interesting portions of the globe. Even some of its physical features are on a scale of unparalleled grandeur. The stupendous mountain chain along its northern frontier rising gradually from a plain of inexhaustible fertility, has snowy summits which tower nearly six thousand feet above the loftiest of any other country in either hemisphere; while over the vast expanse of its magnificently diversified surface almost every product possessed of economical value grows indigenously, or having been introduced is cultivated with success. Nor are its moral less remarkable than its physical features. In its ragged recesses and jungly forests various tribes, supposed to represent its aboriginal inhabitants, may still be seen in a state bordering on absolute barbarism. The great bulk of the population, however", consists of a race, or rather aggregation of races, who, though far advanced in civilization, at least in the ordinary sense of the term, since they have for ages lived under regular government, dwelt in large and splendid cities, and carried most of the arts of common life to high perfection, are yet the dupes and slaves of a most childish and galling superstition. That the dominant class, to which all other's are subservient, should be full of religious zeal, is nothing more than might have been expected, but a new phase of human nature seems to be presented when those occupying the lower grades of the social scale are seen submitting without a murmur to be lorded over, and treated as mere outcasts whose very touch is pollution. "What makes this submission the more extraordinary, is that those who exemplify it are by no means deficient in natural acuteness, and, on the contrary, often give proofs of intellectual culture. Hindooism, though little better than a tissue of obscene and monstrous fancies, not only counts its domination by thousands of years, but can boast of having had among its votaries, men who, in the ages in which they lived, extended the boundaries of knowledge, and earned some of the abstrusest of the sciences to a height which they had never reached before. This remarkable combination of pure intellect and grovelling superstition, nowhere displayed so strikingly and unequivocally as in India, gives a peculiar value even to that part of its history which, relating only to its social state, is necessarily the least fruitful in stirring incidents.
So long as the leading powers of Europe made India a kind of common battle-field, on which they met to contend for supremacy, no one nation could be said to possess any exclusive or peculiar interest in its affairs; but from the moment when Great Britain stood forth, virtually if not formally recognized as the paramount power, the history of both countries became in a manner identified, and ought therefore to be studied as one great whole. The vast space which separates them is a mere circumstance which, if it have any weight
