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Lucknow, 24th April, 1853.

My Dear Sir,

By the last mail I received from a friend in London two articles, whose merits had been much canvassed at the clubs, one from the London “Times,” of the 9th February, and the other from the “Daily News,” a Manchester paper.  The “Times” article must have been written by Mr. J. Marshman, or one of the most rabid members of the school of which he is the great organ, and whose chief characteristic is impatience at the existence of any native territorial chief or great landholder in India.  The other article is a reply to it, and generally supposed to have been written by Sir George Clerk.  I feel quite sure that it was written either by him or by Mr. T. C. Robertson, who preceded him in the government of our North-West Provinces.  The article from the “Times” has been noticed in most of the Indian papers—­the “Friend of India,” April 7th, 1853, and the “Englishman,” 15th April.  But I have not seen that in the “Daily News” noticed in any Indian papers, though admirably written.  I intended to send it to you, but have mislaid it.  I think you can advocate the cause it adopts more consistently, more powerfully, and more wisely than any other editor now in India.  I hope you will do so; for I consider the doctrines of the “Times” disgraceful to our morality, and dangerous to the stability of our rule.  As I consider the welfare of the people of India to depend upon the stability of our rule, I am very anxious to see the fallacies of the atrocious doctrines which endanger it ably exposed.  In no publication are these fallacies more obvious or more numerous than in Mr. George Campbell’s “Modern India,” chapter fourth, with, perhaps, the exception of the “Friend of India.”  With the “Friend,” the theory of confiscation and annexation has become a disease, and he cannot praise or even tolerate any public officer or statesman who is not known to be a convert to the doctrines of this school.

I forget the date of the “Daily News” in which Sir George Clerk’s article appeared, but it was immediately after the article appeared in the London “Times” of the 9th February.  I hope you will give the article a prominent place in your paper, for it really deserves to be printed in letters of gold.  Though I feel that the character of our nation, and our safety in India, are compromised by the open avowal of such atrocious doctrines in our leading journals, still the orders against officers in political employ writing in the papers are so strict, that I dare not attempt to expose the fallacies on which they are based, or express the indignation which they excite in me, in any public paper.  To my superiors, and in the discharge of my public duties, I shall never cease to express my abhorrence of such doctrines, for I look upon them as worse than any that Machiavelli ever wrote.

Believe me,
Yours very sincerely,
(Signed) W. H. SLEEMAN.