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364 That will suffice. The East India Company is well, and forever, answered by one of its own Hindoo subjects.

II. Men outside of India, imperfectly acquainted with its people and the condition of the English administration there, had their theory to account for the rebellion, and supposed that it was owing to causes, among which was the preference of the natives for some other rule—say that of the Russians, whose incoming would be hailed by them as a deliverance from a yoke which galled them, and the misrule of which was crushing them down.

Here, too, let the natives speak for themselves. They know their own grievances best, and have no restraint upon their utterance. The few educated men among them have spoken. Any quantity of testimony might be given, but two or three will suffice. These men understand the difference of things; know what good government, and personal security, and equal rights mean; they appreciate fine roads, arrangements for irrigation, and provision for public instruction; they value peace, and law, and progress; and are well enough acquainted with their country's history to know that their land never had so much of all these as it has to-day. They know this, also, notwithstanding that they are equally alive to what they regard as the defects of the English rule, yet they have patience, and are aware that that too is fast improving in their interest.

One hundred and seventy years ago France contended with England for commercial and military supremacy in Southern India, but England won the rich prize then, as she did at the beginning of this century, when she destroyed the embryo French State which Perron was erecting in North India, on the banks of the Jumna. The Marquis of Wellesley smoked the French out of India by a vigorous use of his artillery, and the Land of the Veda was saved, in the mercy of Heaven, from becoming a French colony, from which freedom, and the Bible, and the missionary would have been excluded for ages, while the wealth of the conquered people might have been employed to inflate French vanity and extend her bigoted misrule over Europe and the world.