her description has left some monument,
either of state or beneficence, behind him. Were we to be driven out of
India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed,
during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than
the orang-outang or the tiger.

There is nothing in the boys we send to India worse than in the boys
whom we are whipping at school, or that we see trailing a pike or
bending over a desk at home. But as English youth in India drink the
intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are
able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they
are ripe in principle, neither Nature nor reason have any opportunity to
exert themselves for remedy of the excesses of their premature power.
The consequences of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of
theirs are probably such) might produce penitence or amendment, are
unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in
England; and the cries of India are given to seas and winds, to be blown
about, in every breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing
ocean. In India all the vices operate by which sudden fortune is
acquired: in England are often displayed, by the same persons, the
virtues which dispense hereditary wealth. Arrived in England, the
destroyers of the nobility and gentry of a whole kingdom will find the
best company in this nation at a board of elegance and hospitality. Here
the manufacturer and husbandman will bless the just and punctual hand
that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the scanty
portion of rice and salt from the peasant of Bengal, or wrung from him
the very opium in which he forgot his oppressions and his oppressor.
They marry into your families; they enter into your senate; they ease
your estates by loans; they raise their value by demand; they cherish
and protect your relations which lie heavy on your patronage; and there
is scarcely an house in the kingdom that does not feel some concern and
interest that makes all reform of our Eastern government appear
officious and disgusting, and, on the whole, a most discouraging
attempt. In such an attempt you hurt those who are able to return
kindness or to resent injury. If you succeed, you save those who cannot
so much as give you thanks. All these things show the difficulty of the
work we have on hand: but they show its necessity, too. Our Indian
government is in its be