British India--Clive and Hastings--East India Company--Its
Oppressions and Extortions--Land Tax--Monopolies--Forced Labor and
Purveyance--Taxes on Idolatry--Amount of Revenue Extorted--Slavery
in India--Famine and Pestilence--The Courts--Rajah of
Sattara--Abolition of Indian Slavery--British India
Society--General Briggs--William Howitt--George Thompson as an
Orator--Lord Brougham's Opinion--Mr. Thompson's Anti-Slavery
Career--His Visit to India--His Defense of the Rajah--Advocates
Corn-Law Repeal--Is Elected to Parliament.
Near the close of the seventeenth century, English ships occasionally
skirted the coast of Hindostan, anxious to exchange a roll of flannel or
a pack of cutlery for a case of muslins or a bag of spices. A surgeon
from one of these vessels was called to attend upon the daughter of the
reigning Prince, and succeeded in curing her of a dangerous disease.
Being asked what reward he would have for his services, he refused to
receive any gift for himself, but solicited commercial privileges for
his countrymen. They were granted; and English trading factories were
established at Madras and Calcutta. These purely trading posts became
the germs of a power which, shooting out its gigantic branches,
ultimately spread over the largest and most fertile portion of the
peninsula of Hindostan. Robert Clive, a clerk in the Madras factory,
laid the foundation of British empire in India. Warren Hastings, a clerk
in the factory at Calcutta, erected upon this foundation a towering
superstructure, whose blighting shadow now covers a million square miles
of territory, inspiring awe in the breasts of a hundred millions of
people. The dominion of Britain over this immense area and population is
justifiable neither by the mode in which it was obtained, nor the manner
in which it has been exercised. Obtained by force, fraud, and cunning,
it has been exercised in a spirit of avarice which might tingle the
cheek of a Shylock with shame, and of oppression which gives verity to
the fabulous tales of Oriental despotisms in the olden time.
The whole of Anglo-India is ruled primarily by the Government of Great
Britain, but a large portion of it is governed practically by the
English East India Company. These sovereigns in Leadenhall street
execute their mandates through a small body of Directors, who
acknowledge a slight allegiance to a Board of Control in Downing street.
They derive their authority from the Charter of the British Crown, and
rule India by permission of the British people. The fundamental
principle of their government is, to make India subservient to their
pecuniary interests, regardless of its own. Proceeding on the plan of
realizing as large a profit as possible on the capital invested, they
have taxed the land to the utmost limits of its capacity to pay, making
every successive province as it fell into their hands a pretext and a
field for higher exactions, and boasting that they have raised the
amount of revenue beyond what native rulers were able to extort. They
have monopolized every branch of trade that could be made productive,
employing in the prosecution the smallest number of laborers, at the
lowest rate of wages. The instructions of the Company to their Indian
agents have been to make as large remittances as possible. This done,
little concern has been felt as to the means employed by the thousand or
twelve hundred Englishmen sent thither to enrich their employers and
amass private fortunes by plundering the country. The periodical
invasion of these hordes of needy adventurers has been like the march of
the locusts of Egypt--before them was fertility and beauty; behind them
was barrenness and desolation. For the Company to listen to the
complaints of the natives, was a sickly sentimentality unbecoming a
great mercantile association; to demand inquiry, was an impertinence; to
redress grievances, no part of the obligations imposed by the charter.
The Hon. F. J. Shore, who spent fifteen years in India, part of the time
as a judge of one of the higher courts, says: "The British Indian
Government has been practically one of the most extortionate and
oppressive that ever existed in India; one under which injustice has
been and may be committed, both by the authorities and by individuals,
(provided the latter be rich,) to an almost unlimited extent, and under
which redress for injuries is almost unattainable." All unprejudiced
authorities agree that Anglo-Indian rule has been worse than that of
either of its predecessors, the Hindoos and Mahometans.
From a mass of documents before me, I will select a few items in support
and illustration of these general statements.
The great curse of India is the _Land Tax_. The principle on which the
Government acts is, that it is the owner of the soil, and that the
occupiers are only tenants at sufferance, though their titles can be
traced backward till lost in the haze of antiquity. While under Hindoo
rule, the people paid to the Government an annual tax equal to one-sixth
of the produce of the soil. The Mahometans, having partially subdued the
Hindoo Princes, increased the tax to one-fourth of the produce. Then
came the civilized and Christianized English. Asking as a boon the
permission to erect two or three warehouses on the coast, they pursued
for many years the humble occupation of factors, dealing in silks,
muslins, rice, spices, and precious stones. Growing rich, insolent,
strong, and rapacious, they overrun the finest provinces, bribing,
swindling, butchering the native Princes. Well secured in their regal
seats, trading became a secondary occupation, subservient to the arts of
diplomacy and the strategy of arms. Having conquered, they resolved to
plunder. They apportioned the soil among surveyors and collectors, whose
duty it was to levy and collect the land tax. The cupidity of the
conquerors increasing by what it fed upon, they ultimately directed the
tax to be fixed at a money value, before the crops were ripe, and to be
rated at the highest capacity of the soil in the most fruitful seasons.
The result is, that in the most favorable years it absorbs one-third of
the produce; in medium years, two-thirds; in years of scarcity, and in
unproductive localities, the whole, and more than the whole--the
deficiency in the latter case being made up from neighboring farms or
districts, or by selling personal property. The average of this tax is
variously estimated at from two-thirds to three-fourths of the annual
produce. The Company instructs the collectors, that "if the crop be even
less than the seed sown, the full tax shall still be demanded. If the
occupier be unable to pay, the deficiency is to be made up by assessing
it on the entire village or neighborhood. If these be unable to pay it,
then on an adjoining village or district--limiting, in such cases, the
assessment to ten or twelve per cent. of the value of the land, lest it
injure the next year's revenue!" The immediate consequences of this
extortion are appalling. Thousands of all classes, ages, and sexes, are
turned out of their homes, and wander about in nakedness and want,
begging and plundering, selling their children into slavery or giving
them to those who will feed and keep them as servants, while other
thousands perish of hunger in the jungles and the highways, or are swept
off by diseases incident to such squalor. In a single year, famine alone
has carried away a million of the population of a land fertilized by a
thousand rivers, and fecund of vegetation under the warm blushes of a
tropical sun.
Next to the land tax, the most noxious fruit of British rule is a system
of Government _Monopolies_, covering not merely the luxuries, but the
necessaries of life. The chief of these are in corn, rice, salt, indigo,
and opium. The district washed by the mouths of the Ganges produces
immense stores of corn and rice. The sea, in the contiguous district of
Madras, throws up large quantities of the most beautiful salt. But,
though the one district furnishes a surplus of what the other is
destitute of, they cannot interchange commodities without paying a
monopoly tax to the Government, which amounts to a positive prohibition.
Even the owner of a plantation bordering on the ocean, whose liberal
waves line it with salt, cannot gather in the product without subjecting
himself to heavy fines and imprisonment. It is all seized by the
Government, and doled out at such prices as to create an annual revenue
of from L2,000,000 to L3,000,000. The opium monopoly is still more
odious. On the finest corn-lands of Benares, Behar, and part of Bengal,
the inhabitants are compelled to grow this pernicious drug, and this
alone. The poppy is planted amid curses, its produce is purchased by
extortion, carried forth by violence, and sold to work the ruin of
millions. The opium being manufactured, the East India Company takes it
all, giving the growers such prices as it pleases. Not long ago, while
selling it at Calcutta at sixty shillings per pound, it allowed but two
shillings per pound to the miserable cultivators. In 1839, it exported
to China alone L2,700,926 in value; and for many years past its annual
profit from the opium monopoly has been estimated to exceed a million
sterling. Other monopolies might be mentioned; but these will suffice as
a specimen.
Another branch of British extortion is what is termed _Forced Labor and
Purveyance_. In procuring supplies for camps; cattle, sheep, and other
food for European soldiers; carriage for troops or civil functionaries;
provisions for jails and implements for convict laborers; trains of
workmen for the Government and for privileged persons--in short, in any
levy for civil or military exigencies, whether in peace or war, the most
cruel exactions are practiced. Out rush the myrmidons of Government, or
privileged Europeans, and seize cattle, camels, sheep, carts, corn,
fruits, and whatever is needed, and wherever found. On highways, at
fairs, on farms, they seize on men, horses, and carriages, to transport
their loads, throwing the effects of the owners into the roads; and
entering shops and dwellings, they carry off what pleases their fancy,
gratifies their appetites, or supplies their necessities. When one of
these military or civic cavalcades is passing over the country, it
scatters terror far and wide. An eye-witness says: "As soon as the
people perceive the _cortege_ approaching, accompanied by a police
officer, they run and hide themselves. You may see, sometimes, half a
village scampering over the fields, pursued by one or more officers in
full hue and cry." As long ago as when Hastings traveled in state from
Calcutta to Benares, to plunder Cheyte Sing of his treasures and his
territories, he expressed his astonishment to see the inhabitants flying
at his approach, shutting up their shops, and escaping to the woods.
Seventy years have scarcely modified the rigors of the conquering
Briton, or abated the terrors of the subdued Indian.
The rapacity of the English rulers cannot be better exemplified than in
the fact, that while British societies have sent missionaries to convert
the natives to Christianity, and on the first Monday of every month tens
of thousands in two hemispheres invoke Divine blessings on "India's
coral strand," the East India Company has levied taxes on travelers who
would visit the Temple of Juggernaut or bathe in the waters of the
Ganges, taxing the devotee before he threw himself under the wheels of
the idol, taxing the widow before she leaped on the funeral pile of her
husband, taxing the mother before she offered her offspring to the
crocodile on the banks of the sacred river, and taxing Hindoos for
becoming Christians, and on their refusal to pay, torturing them with
thumb-screws, and with standing in the burning sun, bearing heavy stones
on their shoulders.
By these and like means, England wrings from this wretched people an
annual revenue of more than twenty millions sterling. Besides this
amount, there are numerous incidental drains upon the resources of the
country, of which no account is rendered or kept, and untold sums
extracted by the unlicensed extortion of individuals and squads, making
the naturally fertile and beautiful peninsula that stretches from the
snows of the Himalaya mountains to the sands of Cape Comorin, the
plundering-ground of England.
And more than this: during ten years of English boasting, immediately
following the abolition of slavery in her West India Colonies, that in
whatever part of the world her flag floated in dominion, there the air
was too pure to be inhaled by a slave, the chattel bondmen of British
India were to be counted by millions, held in servitude by permission of
British laws, which British power could have revoked at any moment by a
dash of the pen.
The calamitous consequences of this long-continued system of oppression
and extortion can hardly be overrated. The ancient public works have
fallen into decay. Public improvement has languished. The roads,
bridges, and canals, are in the most deplorable state. Education and the
arts are neglected. Native property-holders are ruined by taxation. The
laboring poor sink into the arms of beggary, while surrounded by
foreigners who riot in plenty. The earth refuses to yield her natural
increase in return for niggardly culture. And the country has been wont
to relieve itself of its redundant squalor by famines which sweep its
table lands, and by pestilences, which, having depopulated its towns,
take to themselves wings, invade distant nations, cross wide oceans, and
scourge every part of the world.
In return for all these inflictions, and for a trade which crowds her
ports with the richest products of Asia, one would suppose that Great
Britain, which boasts of its judicial and municipal institutions, might
give to India a tolerable internal government. Not so. It could hardly
be more wretched. Its internal affairs are conducted for the same ends
for which its taxes are collected--enriching and aggrandizing the
rulers. Indians are excluded from every honor, dignity, and station,
which the meanest Englishman can be induced to accept. A writer of
probity and experience informs us, that the public offices are sinks of
every species of villainy, fraud, chicane, favoritism, and injustice.
The courts are a libel on the very semblance of justice. Practically,
there is no law for the multitude. Often but a single magistrate can be
found in a district as large as the State of Connecticut. He cannot hear
a tenth of the causes demanding his attention. The distance, the
expenses, the hopelessness of getting a hearing, deter thousands from
seeking it. Those hardy enough to attempt it, on arriving at many of
these tribunals, find them conducted, not in the Hindostanee language,
which the suitor understands, nor in the English, which the judge
speaks, but in the Persian, which neither suitor nor judge knows a word
of. Justice, or rather _judgment_, is sold to the wealthy, and denied to
the poor. If an influential native, in the pay of the Company, or an
Englishman, is prosecuted, the prosecutor may deem himself fortunate if
he and his witnesses are not seized and imprisoned by order of the
Court. If the Government prosecutes for a fine or a tax, torture is
sometimes applied to extort confession and payment. Judge Shore
denounces the inferior courts as sinks of villainy. As to the Supreme
Court, sitting at Calcutta, it has been regarded with an undefined and
unintelligible horror since the day when Impey, at the instigation of
Hastings, sentenced to death Nuncomar, the head of the Hindoo race and
religion, on a trumped-up charge of forgery--a venial offense in the
code of Indian morals.
And this is a feeble picture of England's government of India, a picture
that all the plausible and brilliant extenuations of Macaulay, in his
sketches of Clive and Hastings, do not obscure.
I will give an illustration of the mode by which England has extended
her territory in India.
In the vicinity of the holy city of Benares, on the banks of the sacred
Ganges, resides Purtaub Sing, an illustrious Hindoo prince, better known
as the RAJAH OF SATTARA. He once sat on the throne of Sattara, but for
ten years has been the captive of the British Government, subsisting on
its charity. He is descended from the renowned Sivajee, whose skill and
courage, in the seventeenth century, delivered the Mahrattas from the
Mahometan yoke of the successors of Tamerlane, and founded the mighty
Mahratta empire. This warlike people, so long the terror of the English
in India, made their home in the fastnesses of those mountains whose
blue summits watch the distant coast of Malabar, and on the rich table
lands stretching eastward from their tops, and the alluvial valleys
which slide westward from their base, into the sea of Arabia. In 1817,
after a checkered contest of thirty years, during which the cavalry of
the Mahrattas often carried dismay and havoc among the white villas
sprinkled around Madras, and the rice fields clustering among the mouths
of the Ganges, their empire fell before the superior military skill and
political intrigues of the British. At that time, Purtaub Sing, a youth
of eighteen, was the rightful possessor of the Mahratta throne. By
treaty with his conquerors, a small portion of the territory he had lost
was allotted to him; he was placed on the throne of Sattara, and made
tributary to the Government of Bombay. The mind of the prince was
liberal and acute; his habits frugal and temperate; his character humane
and noble; and for twenty years his just and beneficent rule rendered
his dominions among the happiest and most flourishing in India. For his
many virtues and wise administration, the Directors of the East India
Company, in 1835, presented him a rich gift and a eulogistic vote of
thanks. The neighboring Government of Bombay had long had its greedy eye
on this prosperous principality. Having exhausted the arts of flattery
and chicane to induce the Rajah to relinquish his throne in favor of a
fawning creature of its own, it fastened a quarrel upon him in respect
to certain revenues arising under the treaty of 1817. He appealed to
the Board of Directors at London. They decided in his favor, and sent
their decision to the Governor of Bombay. This was in 1835. The decision
was withheld from the Rajah, and he was kept in profound ignorance of
the result. The Governor now had recourse to the blackest crimes, to
convict him of treasonable designs against the British power in India.
Charges were preferred, and he was brought to trial before Commissioners
appointed to determine his case. It was in vain that he denied the
jurisdiction of the tribunal, and offered to submit the matter to the
Board of Directors. He was pronounced guilty by a majority of the
Commissioners, on evidence since proved to have been perjured and
forged. General Lodwick, the English Resident at his Court, who sat on
the Commission, denounced the testimony, as a mass of perjury and
forgery. The honest soldier was removed from his post, and Colonel
Ovans, an unscrupulous agent of the Bombay Government, appointed in his
place. Not daring to punish the Rajah on the strength of such a trial,
the new Resident was instructed to spare no pains to entrap the unwary
Prince. After two years of vexatious dispute, and fruitless efforts to
inveigle him, desperate measures were employed to accomplish the
rapacious purposes of the Bombay Government. The Prince was dragged from
his bed at midnight, torn from the palace of his ancestors, carried nine
hundred miles across the country, and imprisoned in Benares. His estates
were confiscated, his private treasure seized, his entire territory
secured to the East India Company, and one of its creatures placed on
the vacant throne. Twelve hundred of the Rajah's subjects, with tears
and lamentations, followed their Prince into exile, leaving their wealth
to their persecutors, and bestowing on them their blistering curses.
This black crime was perpetrated in 1839. The principal witnesses
against the Rajah have since confessed their guilt, disclosed the names
of their suborners, and the sums paid for their villainy. In vain has
the deposed Prince appealed for justice to the authorities of the
Company, both in England and India. And this is the way that England
extends her dominions in India--the England that lifts her red hands in
holy horror at Texan annexation and Mexican invasion.
But it would be unjust to suppose that all Englishmen have looked with
indifference, much more with approval, on the administration of Indian
affairs. From the day when Edmund Burke made the old oaken arches of
Westminster Hall ring with his thundering philippics against Warren
Hastings, whose splendid administrative qualities for a time dazzled and
drew the public eye from his gigantic crimes, down to the day when
George Thompson shook the India House by his lightning eloquence in
defense of the deposed Rajah of Sattara, a few jealous eyes have watched
the rulers of India. It is only within the past ten or twelve years that
any considerable portion of the British people has uttered a hearty
protest against English oppression in the East, and demanded justice for
its Oriental brethren. Some palliation for half a century's indifference
may be found in the profound ignorance in which the mass of the English
people were steeped in relation to their Indian empire. Till a late
period, even men of intelligence supposed the functions of the East
India Company were chiefly commercial, and never dreamed that it
marshaled an army in the field three times as numerous as that which
conquered at Waterloo; that its agents reigned over a population
seven-fold that of England, with a power and splendor equaling Roman
proconsuls in the days of Caesar; that it deposed and crowned princes at
pleasure, giving away thrones erected by the successors of Tamerlane;
that the Great Mogul himself, reposing under the mere shadow of his
ancestral greatness, was in reality but the titled pensioner of a
Company, whose arms, intrigues, and extortions had scattered terror,
strife, and poverty from the pine forests of Afghanistan to the cinnamon
groves of Ceylon. But a better day has dawned for India. A people which,
in the stormy times of Clive and Surajah Dowlah, of Hastings and
Maharajah Nuncomar, hardly knew the locality of the island that sent out
their oppressors, and which, in milder days, found it impossible to waft
their complaints across 15,000 miles of ocean, now breathe their
petitions in the ears of a listening Parliament, and through generous
champions make even the great court of the India House echo the
utterance of their wrongs. Many improvements in Indian affairs have
already been secured. The eye of an influential party in England is
fixed upon Hindostan, never to be withdrawn, till British rule ceases to
vex the peninsula, or ceases wholly to exist. Tens of thousands of the
best minds in the kingdom would prefer to see that rule instantly
shivered in atoms, and the army, with the cowardly plunderers that
throng in its train and hide behind its bayonets, driven in defeat and
disgrace from India, than that it should exist for a single day, except
to make atonement for past offenses. And to no man is this change in
public opinion so justly attributable as to GEORGE THOMPSON.
It has already been stated that a better day has dawned on British
India. The first purple streaks of the morning were seen when Earl
Grey's administration abolished the last remnants of the maritime
monopoly of the East India Company, and opened the Indian trade to the
whole commercial marine of the kingdom--an important step in a line of
policy, which, for many years, had been gradually circumscribing the
ancient powers and privileges of the company.[6] The full-orbed sun
arose when, ten years later, chattel-slavery ceased in all the vast
regions stretching from the highlands whence spring the sources of the
Indus and the Ganges, southward to where "the spicy breezes blow soft
o'er Ceylon's isle," elevating millions of serfs to the condition of
men, and verifying the words of our Whittier, that
----"Every flap of England's flag
Proclaims that all around are free,
From farthest Ind to each blue crag
That beetles o'er the western sea."
[6] Since 1813 all British subjects have been permitted to trade to the
East Indies under certain restrictions, which were wholly removed in
1833-4.
This great boon, out of which the slaves of India were defrauded six
years by a political trick, in which the Duke of Wellington bore a
dishonorable part, was a consequence rather than the cause of a broad
and comprehensive movement among the Abolitionists of Great Britain, set
on foot by the benevolence of Joseph Pease, and the eloquence of George
Thompson, for redressing the wrongs of India. In July, 1839, "The
British India Society" was formed, in the presence of a large audience,
in Freemason's Hall, Lord Brougham in the chair. Soon after, auxiliary
societies were organized in Manchester and Glasgow. Lord Brougham, and
Messrs. Clarkson, O'Connell, Cobden, Bright, William Howitt, Joseph
Pease, Gen. Briggs, Dr. Bowring, and George Thompson, were among the
officers of these associations.
The main objects of the British India Society were declared to be, to
inform the public of the history of the British acquisitions in India,
and the character of the British rule therein; to make known the
condition of the natives; to introduce more extensively the cultivation
of cotton, and to develop the resources of the country; to abolish
slavery, and put an end to injurious monopolies; to stay the march of
famine, and quench the lust of conquest; to mitigate the land tax, and
secure for the inhabitants a practical recognition of their claims to
the soil; and to awaken in behalf of that distant people the sentiments
of a genuine sympathy, and a proper sense of national responsibility in
the empire which claims to govern them.
These noble objects have been kept steadily in view during the past ten
years. The soul of the enterprise has been Mr. Thompson. He has been
greatly aided by Major General John Briggs, a generous and gallant
soldier, who spent thirty years in India, traveled over most of the
Peninsula, administered the Government in several provinces, and has
published two able works on the Land Tax, and on the Cotton Trade of
India. Mr. William Howitt, so favorably known in our country as a writer
of taste and research, has given many of the best productions of his pen
to the same cause. Numerous public meetings have been addressed by
Brougham, O'Connell, Bowring, Thompson, Briggs, and others; valuable
pamphlets issued; and a great amount of startling information spread
before the public eye. A radical change in the administration of Indian
affairs is demanded by a body daily increasing in numbers and influence,
whose advocates have found their way into the Board of Directors, the
Court of Proprietors, and the Halls of Parliament.
I will now speak more particularly of Mr. Thompson. At the close of his
speech on the occasion of the formation of the British India Society,
Lord Brougham said: "I have always great pleasure in listening to Mr.
Thompson, who is the most eloquent man and the most accomplished orator
whom I know; and as I have no opportunity of hearing him where he ought
to speak, inside the walls of Parliament, I am anxious never to lose an
opportunity of hearing him, where alone I can hear him, in a public
meeting like the present." This is high eulogy, but it will not be
deemed extravagant by those who have listened to its subject in his
happiest moods.
Mr. T. was bred in a mercantile house in London. While a clerk, business
could not prevent the gratification of his fondness for books, nor the
cultivation of his remarkable native powers of elocution. He devoured
libraries, and mingled in the debating clubs of the metropolis. In 1830,
having read the great speech of Rev. Dr. Thomson, of Edinburgh, in favor
of immediate emancipation, he embraced the doctrine, and soon after was
invited by the London Anti-Slavery Society to traverse the country, and
bring its objects before the people. His addresses in Liverpool,
Manchester, Glasgow, and other large towns, drew throngs of hearers; and
so great was their influence, that the West India body, taking the
alarm, employed Mr. Peter Borthwick (afterward, like Mr. T., elected to
Parliament) to meet him, and present the slaveholding view of the
question. This was the very stimulus needed to bring out all the powers
of Thompson; for Borthwick was an able, ardent, and accomplished
advocate. They measured swords on many a field in the presence of
thousands, their encounters often extending through several successive
evenings. Most unflinchingly and right gallantly did Borthwick bear
himself in these conflicts. He was a foeman worthy of the glittering
blade of his antagonist, and many a time did he feel its piercing point
and excoriating edge. But the advocate of Slavery was not an equal match
for the champion of Freedom; and he could hardly have been, had their
relative positions been reversed. As it was, he was invariably
overthrown. Thompson shook him from the point of his weapon, quivering
and bleeding, at every crossing of swords. Many of Mr. Thompson's
speeches were reported. They are crowded with passages of power and
beauty. Master of the facts of his case; skilled in its logic; expert in
the arts of attack and defense; apt in quotations and allusions; fertile
in illustrations; singularly perfect in the command of language, still
his _forte_ lay in the power of his appeals to the humanity, the sense
of justice, the hatred of oppression, the innate love of liberty, of his
hearers. When rapt with his theme, his frame throbbing with emotion, the
perspiration dripping from his forehead and hands, his voice pealing
like a trumpet, his action as graceful and impetuous as that of a
blood-horse on the course, the hearer who, for the moment, could stifle
the sentiment that Slavery was the most atrocious system under heaven,
might be trusted to sleep quietly on his knapsack in the breach, when it
spouted a torrent of fire.
The next year after the passage of the West India abolition act, Mr.
Thompson visited this country, where he remained till driven from our
shores for advocating the natural equality of man, and his inalienable
right to liberty. We would not permit a foreigner to interfere with our
institutions--it was offensive, indelicate, impertinent. Probably
Nicholas, the Sultan, Ferdinand, Victoria, Louis Philippe, and
Metternich, thought just so when we interfered with Poland, Greece,
South America, Ireland, France, and Germany. Not knowing the
particulars, I shall not go into the details.
Returning to England, Mr. T. joined his old associates for the overthrow
of the West India apprenticeship. When victory crowned their exertions,
his brilliant services, with those of the more sober but not less
efficient Joseph Sturge, were specially commended by Lord Brougham in
one of his great speeches in the House of Peers.
Mr. Thompson now turned his attention to the affairs of British India.
Having formed the British India Society, and established auxiliary
associations in various parts of England, he, in 1842-3, visited India.
His fame as the advocate of the rights of the natives had preceded him.
In several parts of the country, he was greeted with long processions of
richly-caparisoned elephants and camels, with cymbals and trumpets, and
the gorgeous pomp customary in the festivities of orient climes. But he
visited India for business, and not for show. He traveled through the
upper provinces, held conferences with the people, gathered a store of
important information, and, having been personally solicited by the
Rajah of Sattara and the Emperor of Delhi, to present their claims
before the British Parliament, he returned to England.
On a murky afternoon, in the dingy hall of the Court of Proprietors, in
Leadenhall street, which was filled by merchants and speculators in
India stocks, eager to pocket the spoils wrung from a people whom they
had first conquered and then plundered, a tall man, personally unknown
to but few present, rose from one of the back benches, and, with a pile
of dog-eared documents before him, proposed to bring the case of the
deposed Rajah of Sattara to the consideration of the Court. At this
announcement, a few members, not so dozy as the majority, turned their
heads to see who this intruder could be. It was not long before he had
thoroughly roused these free and easy gentlemen to a full sense of
consciousness. Mr. George Thompson (for he was the man) began to spread
out the unmitigated rascality of the transactions I have detailed. He
was soon interrupted. His right to be there was questioned. But he was
the proprietor of a sufficient amount of stock to entitle him to be
heard. He went on. He was called to order. He would not come, but still
went on. They proposed to take down his offensive words. He begged them
to be patient, and he would soon give them something worth taking down.
He was declared impertinent. He insisted that his speech was decidedly
pertinent. Clamor was tried. His voice pierced the din, with the
defiance that "he _would_ be heard." He was denounced as the feed agent
of the Rajah. He repelled the charge in a passage of cutting power. He
was threatened. But he rode on the surges of too many mobs, in the
turbulent days of the West India discussion, to be frightened at a
tempest in the East India House. He still held his ground, and kept up a
heavy and well-directed fire. The excitement was intense, the turmoil
continuing till three o'clock in the morning. It was one of the
stormiest sessions which had ever taken place in that stormy hall. It
revived the recollection of the days when Lord Clive, the founder of the
Anglo-Indian empire, encountered Sullivan, the prince of London
merchants, and the chairman of the Company, who had tabled infamous
charges against him; or the days when Warren Hastings, laden with rupees
and flushed with triumphs, measured powers with his deadly foe, Sir
Philip Francis, the author of Junius. Above the war of this tempestuous
night, the trumpet-voice of the gallant Thompson was heard, cheering on
the band that rallied to the defense of the dethroned Rajah. It was an
era in the history of the Indian Court of Proprietors. Justice,
humanity, right, honor, were strange words to be echoed from arches
which had so long looked down on fraud, cruelty, oppression, and
avarice. Thanks to George Thompson, these words are becoming more and
more familiar in that temple of Mammon.
When the Corn-Law struggle was approaching its crisis, Mr. T. yielded to
the solicitations of the League to again advocate its cause before the
country. He had been an agent of the League previous to going to India,
and his peculiar eloquence contributed essentially to the rapid change
of public opinion during the years 1841-2. In the last year of the
Corn-Law contest, he fought shoulder to shoulder with Cobden, Villiers,
Bright, and Wilson, and no Free Trade chief carried over that triumphant
field a brighter blade or a stouter shield than he.
As a testimonial of their regard for his many services in the cause of
civil and religious liberty, the Lord Provost and Magistrates of
Edinburgh presented him, in June, 1846, with the freedom of their
venerable city. A higher honor awaited him. At the general election in
1847, Mr. Thompson was returned to the House of Commons for the Tower
Hamlets, by the largest majority, over a popular opponent, obtained by
any member of the new House.
In addition to the reforms already mentioned, he is the advocate of
Universal Suffrage, of a dissolution of the union of Church and State,
of Free Education, of Retrenchment in all departments of the Government.
In a word, he is a radical democrat.
I have already spoken of his powers as an orator. His logic is not of
the firstly, secondly, thirdly sort--a didactic, pulpit sort of
logic--but a sort in which all the numerals are combined, and
confounded, and sent home with the accelerated momentum of geometrical
progression. His rhetoric is not so systematic as Campbell's, nor so
stiff as Blair's, but leaps spontaneously from a fruitful mind, from an
observation of men and things active and broad, from a sympathy with the
grand in nature, and the beautiful in art. He attacks an opponent with a
general pell-mell of argument, fact, appeal, sarcasm, and wit, not the
more easily repelled because this onset of "all arms" is not arrayed
according to the precise rules of art, but comes from unexpected
quarters, and in unanticipated forms. He deals seriously with the great
facts of his subject, and specially addresses himself to the higher
parts of man's nature--the reason, the conscience, the affections. Yet
can he gambol in playful humor, throwing the galling arrow of sarcasm,
scattering the _jet d'eau_ of wit, or with a stroke of his crayon,
drawing the ludicrous caricature, imitating to the life any peculiarity
in the tone or manner of his antagonist--gliding from grave to gay, from
lively to severe, with charming grace. His speeches might be set down
merely as rare specimens of elocution or declamation, but for one
peculiarity. They deal largely with the facts, the details of the case
in hand. He _reads up_ on every topic he discusses. His stores of facts
are relieved of all dryness or repulsion in the presentation, by the
panoramic style in which he marshals them before the eye, all clad in
the garb furnished forth by a rich elocution and lively fancy. Here lies
his strength; for a single apposite fact outweighs, with the mass of
men, a whole volume of abstract reasoning or florid declamation. His
story charms like a well-acted tragedy or well-written novel.
If India shall ever enjoy a Government which protects its rights and
promotes its prosperity, its happy millions will pronounce no name with
more grateful accents than that of their early friend and advocate,
George Thompson.