friends among the Hindus, you will find them, and you may trust them.
There is one book which for many years I have been in the habit of recommending, and another against which I have always been warning those of the candidates for the Indian Civil Service whom I happened to see at Oxford ; and I believe both the advice and the warning have in several cases borne the very best fruit. The book which I consider most mischievous, nay, which I hold responsible for some of the greatest misfortunes that have happened to India, is Mill's History of British India, even with the antidote against its poison, which is supplied by Professor Wilson's notes. The book which I recommend, and which I wish might be published again in a cheaper form, so as to make it more generally accessible, is Colonel Sleeman's Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, published in 1844, but written originally in 1835-1836.
Mill's History, no doubt, you all know, particularly the Candidates for the Indian Civil Service, who, I am sorry to say, are recommended to read it and are examined in it. Still, in order to substantiate my strong condemnation of the book, I shall have to give a few proofs :
Mill in his estimate of the Hindu character is chiefly guided by Dubois, a French missionary, and by Orme and Buchanan, Tennant, and Ward, all of them neither very competent nor very unprejudiced judges. Mill 1[1] , however, picks out all that is most unfavourable from their works, and omits the qualifications which even these writers felt bound to give to their wholesale
- ↑ 1 Mill's History, ed. Wilson, vol. i. p. 368.
