“Thus, among the English inhabitants of India, there are no fit subjects for that species of excitement which the Press sometimes produces at home.  There is no class among them analogous to that vast body of English labourers and artisans whose minds are rendered irritable by frequent distress and privation, and on whom, therefore, the sophistry and rhetoric of bad men often produce a tremendous effect.  The English papers here might be infinitely more seditious than the most seditious that were ever printed in London without doing harm to anything but their own circulation.  The fire goes out for want of some combustible material on which to seize.  How little reason would there be to apprehend danger to order and property in England from the most inflammatory writings, if those writings were read only by Ministers of State, Commissioners of the Customs and Excise, Judges and Masters in Chancery, upper clerks in Government offices, officers in the army, bankers, landed proprietors, barristers, and master manufacturers!  The most timid politician would not anticipate the smallest evil from the most seditious libels, if the circulation of those libels were confined to such a class of readers; and it is to such a class of readers that the circulation of the English newspapers in India is almost entirely confined.”

The motive for the scurrility with which Macaulay was assailed by a handful of sorry scribblers was his advocacy of the Act familiarly known as the Black Act, which withdrew from British subjects resident in the provinces their so-called privilege of bringing civil appeals before the Supreme Court at Calcutta.  Such appeals were thenceforward to be tried by the Sudder Court, which was manned by the Company’s judges, “all of them English gentlemen of liberal education; as free as even the judges of the Supreme Court from any imputation of personal corruption, and selected by the Government from a body which abounds in men as honourable and as intelligent as ever were employed in the service of any state.”  The change embodied in the Act was one of little practical moment; but it excited an opposition based upon arguments and assertions of such a nature that the success or failure of the proposed measure became a question of high and undeniable importance.

“In my opinion,” writes Macaulay, “the chief reason for preferring the Sudder Court is this—­that it is the court which we have provided to administer justice, in the last resort, to the great body of the people.  If it is not fit for that purpose, it ought to be made so.  If it is fit to administer justice to the great body of the people, why should we exempt a mere handful of settlers from its jurisdiction?  There certainly is, I will not say the reality, but the semblance of partiality and tyranny in the distinction made by the Charter Act of 1813.  That distinction seems to indicate a notion that the natives of India may well put up with something less than justice,