cite a feeling against this
measure among the English inhabitants of Calcutta.

"The political phraseology of the English in India is the same with the
political phraseology of our countrymen at home; but it is never to be
forgotten that the same words stand for very different things at London
and at Calcutta. We hear much about public opinion, the love of liberty,
the influence of the Press. But we must remember that public opinion
means the opinion of five hundred persons who have no interest, feeling,
or taste in common with the fifty millions among whom they live; that
the love of liberty means the strong objection which the five hundred
feel to every measure which can prevent them from acting as they choose
towards the fifty millions, that the Press is altogether supported by
the five hundred, and has no motive to plead the cause of the fifty
millions.

"We know that India cannot have a free Government. But she may have
the next best thing--a firm and impartial despotism. The worst state in
which she can possibly be placed is that in which the memorialists would
place her. They call on us to recognise them as a privileged order of
freemen in the midst of slaves. It was for the purpose of averting
this great evil that Parliament, at the same time at which it suffered
Englishmen to settle in India, armed us with those large powers which,
in my opinion, we ill deserve to possess, if we have, not the spirit to
use them now."

Macaulay had made two mistakes. He had yielded to the temptation of
imputing motives, a habit which the Spectator newspaper has pronounced
to be his one intellectual vice, finely adding that it is "the vice
of rectitude;" and he had done worse still, for he had challenged his
opponents to a course of agitation. They responded to the call. After
preparing the way by a string of communications to the public journals,
in to which their objections to the Act were set forth at enormous
length, and with as much point and dignity as can be obtained by
a copious use of italics and capital letters, they called a public
meeting, the proceedings at which were almost too ludicrous for
description. "I have seen," said one of the speakers, "at a Hindoo
festival, a naked dishevelled figure, his face painted with grotesque
colours, and his long hair besmeared with dirt and ashes. His tongue was
pierced with an iron bar, and his breast was scorched by the fire from
the burning altar which rested on his stomach.