the benefit of their services in those departments, for which time and circumstances, though not their birth, had prepared them, the nation must be reduced to a stagnant state of semi-barbarism, and of imbecility both at home and abroad. And is not this sufficiently evidenced in the present degradation of this vast and magnificent empire? Has not the sad experience of hundreds of years imprinted, as with an iron pen, on the minds of all who have eyes to see, understandings to judge, yea, or even hearts to feel, the strongest conviction that this religious division into castes has, by detaching tribe from tribe and forcing important professions upon unwilling and perhaps unsuitable individuals, proved the real cause of India’s internal misery and external humiliation? What other nation under the sun has continued under foreign dominion for centuries and centuries without ever exhibiting the least impatience, or making the smallest effort for liberty and independence?
Before we can properly introduce the subject prescribed for this article to the notice of our readers, a few preliminary observations on the ancient annals of Bengal will not be misplaced. Although at present a most important division of Hindustan, containing the metropolis of British India and the seat of her Supreme Council, and peculiarly adapted by position and soil for commerce and trade, Bengal does not seem to have enjoyed much consequence in this vast empire, before foreigners were attracted thither for mercantile purposes. The silence of the old Hindu writers would incline us to the belief that it is for the most part alluvial land, and that originally the lower provinces were, in a great measure, comprehended in the unfathomed recesses of the deep;—that the present metropolitan residence of the British viceroy in the East, was, at one time, the bed of the mighty ocean! Forest and marshes probably occupied the soil as the sea abandoned it, and human habitations were subsequently formed, where tigers had once prowled and fishes disported. Who the original inhabitants were, or when they settled, can at this distant age only be a question of conjecture. That the existing occupiers of the soil are all descended from the Aborigines, we are not willing to believe. That these are all colonists and emigrants we are also loath to admit. That the wild hill tribes on the frontiers are the only relics of the first inhabitants cannot be proved to anybody’s satisfaction. The truth seems to lie between these varying propositions. The savage clans dwelling in the recesses of jungles and hills, are proper representatives of the people in their pristine condition. But of these, large numbers may have been humanized by amalgamation with more civilized emigrants.
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