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 best state a grievance.  It is necessary that the correctives should be uncommonly vigorous, and the work of men sanguine, warm, and even impassioned in the cause.  But it is an arduous thing to plead against abuses of a power which originates from your own country, and affects those whom we are used to consider as strangers.

I shall certainly endeavor to modulate myself to this temper; though I am sensible that a cold style of describing actions, which appear to me in a very affecting light, is equally contrary to the justice due to the people and to all genuine human feelings about them.  I ask pardon of truth and Nature for this compliance.  But I shall be very sparing of epithets either to persons or things.  It has been said, (and, with regard to one of them, with truth,) that Tacitus and