PREFACE.

I

IN his work entitled The Reign of Queen Victoria, India,' Sir John Strachey remarks, "Sir Henry Maine has pointed out with admirable truth the consequences in India of the fact that English classical literature towards the end of the last century was 'saturated with party politics.' 'This,' he says, 'would have been a less serious fact if, at this epoch, one chief topic of the great writers and rhetoricians, of Burke and Sheridan, of Fox and Francis, had not been India itself. have no doubt that the view of Indian government taken at the end of the century by Englishmen whose works and speeches are held to be models of English style has had deep effect on the mind of the educated Indian of this day. We are only now beginning to see how excessively inaccurate were their statements of fact and how one-sided were their judgments.' These remarks of Sir Henry Maine point to what I have long believed to be a serious misfortune-the non-existence of any history of British India, which is trustworthy and complete in its facts, and which at the same time possesses the essential quality of literary excellence. Since the earlier part of the present century the old stories of the crimes by which

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the establishment of our power in India was attended have been passed on from one author to another. ́. . . These calumnies have caused and are still causing no little mischief both in England and India. Thousands of excellent people are filled with righteous indignation when they read of the atrocious acts of Clive and Hastings, the judicial murder of Nandkumar, the extermination of the Rohillas, the plunder of the Begums. No suspicion of the truth reaches them that these horrors never occurred, and the fear can hardly be repressed that there may be some foundation even now for the charges of Indian misgovernment and oppression. . . . This false history is systematically taught by ourselves, and believed by the educated natives of India to be true. It is impossible that this should not have a serious effect on their feelings towards their English rulers." By all who are conversant with the progress of education in India, and perhaps by none so readily as those who have had a professional part in it, these words will be endorsed as not one whit exaggerated. And if such be really the outcome of our "enlightened policy," in the forefront of the band by whom misconception has been propagated, stands Macaulay. His two celebrated Indian essays comprehend nearly the whole of that period regarding which, while error came so easily, the truth-at all events till lately-was difficult of discovery, that period for which the records were the records of a mercantile corporation primarily concerned in making money. The fierce light that beats upon a modern administration was unknown to the Honourable East India Company. Its servants thought

little of posterity, cared nothing that the history they were making should, on its transfusion into narrative, be ordered and marshalled with the stately precision by which a more self-conscious regime guards itself against detraction and misunderstanding. But the. indifference of these pioneers of empire has helped to blur and blot the fair fame of many of their own number; and if historians have grievously caricatured both men and measures, there is for them at least the excuse that their distortion of objects is due in perhaps less degree to dimness of vision than to haziness of the medium in which the work had to be done. That there has also been deliberate injustice cannot, I fear, be denied. Macaulay himself was not seldom biassed by political sympathies; though his worst shortcomings are the shortcomings of one who has placed unwise confidence in apparently trustworthy guides. Mill is a much greater sinner. But Mill has few charms, and his narrative would never stir so much as a spasm of enthusiastic belief or kindle the faintest glow of fervid partizanship. With Macaulay the case is very different. The transparent lucidity of his style, the rich colouring, the dramatic vividness, the apt illustration, the swift assemblage of images so various and yet so cumulative in their effect, his learning worn so lightly and yet so massive in its strength, the splendour with which he lights up a battle-piece or the pageantry in which he decks some time-honoured ceremonial, his copious vocabulary of invective and scorn, his hatred of meanness and injustice, his lofty imagination, "that noble faculty," as he himself says in regard to Burke, "whereby man is

number who have to

able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and in the unreal"-combine to throw over whatever he writes a glamour that no one can resist, least of all those in whom the pulse of life still throbs with full-toned animation, with whom belief is still a joy, and hero-worship a necessity. While, therefore, of those who have to study his essays the number is small as compared with the study dry histories, and the histories of India are probably unique in their dryness, not only to English but to Indian readers,-the hold which he obtains is immeasurably greater and more enduring than that which is taken by the laborious chroniclers of wearisome detail padded with trite reflection, the compilers of narrative that has neither foreground nor background, neither proportion nor perspective. A writer like Macaulay makes converts, who in their turn find disciples. To hand down his doctrines becomes a religion. His very fallacies are the shibboleth of a school. Add to this that his reputation as a scholar, as a historian, as a jurist, still looms as large as ever, and it is easy to understand that prestige of this nature should keep loyal those who might waver, and hold back those who would venture to criticize. If, then, these two essays are to be put into the hands of students and set as subjects of an examination, it cannot be done with safety unless at the same time an endeavour is made to show wherein their statements are inaccurate, and how the views put forward in them assume an altered colouring from the light of fuller information. The essay on Hastings more especially needs such rectification, and this for

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