peace of Amiens. The instructions arrive when the French army is
encamped at Boulogne, and when the whole island is up in arms to
repel invasion. A despatch is written asking for instructions
when Bonaparte is at Elba. The instructions come when he is at
the Tuilleries. A despatch is written asking for instructions
when he is at the Tuilleries. The instructions come when he is
at St Helena. It would be just as impossible to govern India in
London as to govern England at Calcutta. While letters are
preparing here on the supposition that there is profound peace in
the Carnatic, Hyder is at the gates of Fort St George. While
letters are preparing here on the supposition that trade is
flourishing and that the revenue exceeds the expenditure, the
crops have failed, great agency houses have broken, and the
government is negotiating a loan on hard terms. It is notorious
that the great men who founded and preserved our Indian empire,
Clive and Warren Hastings, treated all particular orders which
they received from home as mere waste paper. Had not those great
men had the sense and spirit so to treat such orders, we should
not now have had an Indian empire. But the case of China is far
stronger. For, though a person who is now writing a despatch to
Fort William in Leadenhall Street or Cannon Row, cannot know what
events have happened in India within the last two months, he may
be very intimately acquainted with the general state of that
country, with its wants, with its resources, with the habits and
temper of the native population, and with the character of every
prince and minister from Nepaul to Tanjore. But what does
anybody here know of China? Even those Europeans who have been
in that empire are almost as ignorant of it as the rest of us.
Everything is covered by a veil, through which a glimpse of what
is within may occasionally be caught, a glimpse just sufficient