PREFACE

Summary

Those who read these letters with attention cannot fail to perceive that my most earnest desire and most cherished ambition is to induce Englishmen at home to take a lively and effective interest in the native population of their Eastern dominions; and with that view to lay before them a plain statement of the feeling which is entertained towards that population by the European settlers in India. This is a task which cannot be undertaken by an anonymous writer. On a matter so momentous evidence will not be received from a witness whose character and antecedents are unknown. On all the great questions which now agitate Anglo-Indian society the civilians and the settlers are at odds: so that men naturally reject the testimony of an author whom the larger half of his readers and reviewers believe to be a civilian. The admiration expressed in the fourth letter for the gallantry of Macdonell and Mangles, and the recital of the advantages of a public career in India contained in the fifth, were successively attributed to the predilection of the author for his own Service. This was of little consequence: but not so with the ninth letter, which exposes at length the horrible tone adopted by a certain class of Anglo-Indians regarding the murder of natives by Europeans. This exposition consists almost entirely of extracts from the Anglo-Indian journals themselves: and yet it was styled “a burst of civilian hatred against the Independent Settler” by no less a journal than the Spectator, which had noticed the previous letters most favourably and courteously.