because they made the conquered country their own.  They rose or fell with the rise or fall of the territory they lived in.  Fathers there deposited the hopes of their posterity; and children there beheld the monuments of their fathers.  Here their lot was finally cast; and it is the natural wish of all that their lot should not be cast in a bad land.  Poverty, sterility, and desolation are not a recreating prospect to the eye of man; and there are very few who can bear to grow old among the curses of a whole people.  If their passion or their avarice drove the Tartar lords to acts of rapacity or tyranny, there was time enough, even in the short life of man, to bring round the ill effects of an abuse of power upon the power itself.  If hoards were made by violence and tyranny, they were still domestic hoards; and domestic profusion, or the rapine of a more powerful and prodigal hand, restored them to the people.  With many disorders, and with few political checks upon power, Nature had still fair play; the sources of acquisition were not dried up; and therefore the trade, the manufactures, and the commerce of the country flourished.  Even avarice and usury itself operated both for the preservation and the employment of national wealth.  The husbandman and manufacturer paid heavy interest, but then they augmented the fund from whence they were again to borrow.  Their resources were dearly bought, but they were sure; and the general stock of the community grew by the general effort.

But under the English government all this order is reversed.  The Tartar invasion was mischievous; but it is our protection that destroys India.  It was their enmity; but it is our friendship.  Our conquest there, after twenty years, is as crude as it was the first day.  The natives scarcely know what it is to see the gray head of an Englishman.  Young men (boys almost) govern there, without society and without sympathy with the natives.  They have no more social habits with the people than if they still resided in England,—­nor, indeed, any species of intercourse, but that which is necessary to making a sudden fortune, with a view to a remote settlement.  Animated with all the avarice of age and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another, wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting.  Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost forever to India.  With us are no retributory superstitions, by which a foundation of charity compensates, through ages, to the poor, for the rapine and injustice of a day.  With us no pride erects stately monuments which repair the mischiefs which pride had produced, and which adorn a country out of its own spoils.  England has erected no churches, no hospitals,[56] no palaces, no schools; England has built no bridges, made no high-roads, cut no navigations, dug out no reservoirs.  Every other conqueror of every other 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.