424

EAST INDIA COMPANY'S CHARTER.

pany are vested in the British Queen, and all its powers are to be exercised in her name. One of the principal Secretaries of State to have all the powers hitherto exercised by the Company, or the Board of Control. The military and naval forces of the East India Company are to be deemed the forces of the Queen; and all persons holding any office, employment, or commission in India, are transferred to be the servants of the Crown. All the functions and powers of the Directors and Proprietors are to cease, together with the salaries paid, and the Board of Control is likewise abolished." This Act stripped the Company of all its power and importance, with the exception that the Directors have the administration of the stock of the former East India Company.

Very little was generally known in England of the operations of the East India Company over the vast territory and population held under its sway. Only a few men like Dr. Bowring, Macaulay, and other statesmen and philanthropists who had thoroughly informed themselves on the subject, had the faintest conception of the mighty system of fraud, robbery and oppression by which nearly 200,000,000 of the Indian people were held. But when the matter was taken hold of in earnest, and made the subject of discussion in Parliament and in the press, such fearful revelations were made as excited the indignation of all those classes of the British nation that were not directly concerned in perpetuating so colossal a system of injustice. An Investigating Commission was appointed, and at last Parliament was compelled by the irresistible pressure of. public opinion to refuse a renewal of the charter of the East India Company. It was then deprived of its powers which had been wielded for two centuries with such merciless despotism. The facts brought out were so astounding, that the public conscience of the nation was awakened by the spectacle of a structure of tyranny and wrong, far exceeding in atrocity and extent anything that had ever been known in the history of the human race. I shall be able to show to the complete satisfaction of my readers, that at no period of history has any system of hu

ORIGIN OF THE COMPANY.

425

man suffering and outrage existed worthy to be compared with the reign of the East India Company. Side by side with it, slavery, as it existed among the elder nations, in Greece, or in Rome, loses its magnitude and importance; while serfdom in Russia, or slavery in our Southern States, in Cuba, or the lately emancipated British islands, or in Brazil, with all their concentrated wrongs, are not worthy for one instant to be spoken of with what we shall find in the East Indies; we should search the chronicles of the world in vain for an instance in which a civilized or a barbarous power has inflicted so inhuman and malignant a despotism upon any one community, not to say upon whole classes of nations, embracing a quarter of the whole human race. I shall, moreover, show that Parliament took the power from the East India Company and transferred it to the Crown without reaching any considerable portion of the evils of the system, and that to-day that system remains nearly unchanged in its principal features, unmitigated in its atrocities, and unsubdued in its ferocity upon a prostrate and unoffending race. Well might Edmund Burke exclaim, in speaking of the British reign in India, ""Tis an awful thing."

III.

LIZABETH, two hundred and sixty-six years ago, granted

ELIZABETH,

to a company of London merchants an exclusive right to the commerce of India for fifteen years; and soon after, four merchant ships sailed from England to the Molluccas. The privileges of the Company were successively renewed; and from its first feeble commencement, up to the final abolition of its charter, it was steadily extending its power over those immense regions, until at last it consolidated an empire of one million, five hundred thousand square miles in extent, embracing nearly two hundred millions of subjects. To trace all the steps by which they acquired that immense empire, the struggles they had to pass through, the intrigues they practised at home to preserve their dominion, the unjust advantages they

426

TERRITORY OF THE COMPANY.

took of other nations, as well as the outrageous tyranny which characterized their dealings with the native chiefs and their people, would require such a volume of human crime and human woe as never yet has been written, and perhaps never will be unfolded till the great day of judgment.

The territory over which the East India Company held sway, embraced the vast peninsula of Hindustan, bounded on the north by the great chain of Himalaya mountains separating India and China, on the east by Burmah, and on the south by the Bay of Bengal, and on the west by the great river Indus and the Indian ocean. The island of Ceylon was also embraced in the English possessions. The affairs of the Company were administrated by a Court of twenty-four Directors, elected by the Company, who chose their own Chairman and Deputy, and appointed salaried officers of every description for carrying on their immense business. This Court united with the Board of Control, chosen from the Ministry of the Crown, in electing the Governor-General of Bengal, the Governors of the presidencies of Madras and Bombay, of the subordinate dependencies, the Commander-in-chief and all inferior officers. At each presidency the Governor was assisted by a council composed of a certain number of the senior civil servants of the Company at that presidency.

The most striking feature in the government of the Company was the vast military force, by means of which their extensive dominion was originally acquired, and subsequently maintained. Its composition was more remarkable than that of any other army. India then presented, and still does, the spectacle of subjection to a foreign yoke through her own troops, paid with her own money; and although mutinies sometimes occurred, with frightful scenes to remind their oppressors that a nation which binds one end of the chain around its vassals, fastens the other around itself, yet until the great Sepoy Rebellion, the hold of the East India Company over these innumerable millions had not been seriously disputed.

GROWTH OF THE COMPANY.

427

IV.

HE native army attained its greath strength and discipline by gradual steps. A few Sepoy battalions were at first employed, merely as an appendage to the Company's force, while an adjutant, captain and some sergeants were the only English officers attached to them. With the skill communicated by these, and the use of musketry, they easily vanquished the irregular troops of the native princes. The native army at last comprised above 230,000 infantry and 26,000 cavalry, constituting one of the best equipped and most efficient standing armies in the world, all in a state of perfect discipline, and ready to take the field at a day's notice. The company itself had also 8,000 troops levied in Europe, aided by 20,000 of the Queen's regular army.

The entire population of this vast empire were subjected to the most degrading servitude. Slavery in its most odious and cruel forms existed, and exists to-day with only slight modifications, holding millions in cruel bondage, while tens of millions were and are in different forms reduced to a condition of abject vassalage, bringing with it innumerable instances of as deep or leeper degradation than has ever attended African slavery in any quarter of the globe.

It is worth our time briefly to consider the means by which the Company held, and by which the government still retains these numerous vassal States under its control. From the beginning it had been by the same system of conduct, and in the same spirit, though on a smaller scale, as was exhibited in the suppression of the late Sepoy insurrection.

The first and most efficient expedient was to quarter in the territories of the native princes, with their real or apparent consent, troops maintained at their expense. They were understood to be placed there solely to secure these princes either against foreign aggression, or the efforts of domestic rivals, without interfering in any shape with the internal government.

428

HOW INDIA WAS SUBDUED.

The presence, however, in the heart of their dominions, of a force decidedly superior in discipline and number to their own, reduced the Indian princes of course to absolute obedience. This point gained, the next step was to require that instead of money payments to the Company, the prince should should cede a portion of his territory, the revenues of which were to be applied to defray the expenses of these subsidiary troops, which often obliged these princes to mortgage their lands, while agreements to entrust the defence of their borders to the company were entered into, and the discontinuance of all political and diplomatic intercourse with every other power. The last stage of subjection was reached when the prince was required to resign the whole administration into the hands of his former protectors, and to retain the mere pomp and name of royaltystripped of his fortune and liberty.

True, the first step was often cheerfully acceded to, and sometimes solicited by the prince when his power was threatened, either by foreign or domestic foes. But not long afterwards, the yoke began to be painfully felt both by the ruler and his people; and the native sovereigns yielded up their land only under the pressure of invincible necessity. Disturbances often arose under the grinding oppression of this foreign interference, which could be suppressed only by an increase of the military forces, which served still further to augment the burdens of the subjugated people.

V.

A

T last, after many hard but unavailing struggles against the diplomacy, intrigue, cunning, martial power and skill of the British empire, the prince with his people surrendered himself to the oppressive rule of his Christian tyrants. This system has been practiced so generally, and for such a length of time, that at last a great part of the broad and rich lands of India have passed from the hands of their lawful proprietors, into the hands of selfish and perfidious speculators, who, from the