be stable at all, but to be carried
everywhere as the passions of the moment and the ideas generated at the
hour may determine. But, thoroughly to deal with such phenomena as
these, we must examine the mode in which national characters can be
emancipated from the rule of custom, and can be prepared for the use of
choice.

NO. V.

THE AGE OF DISCUSSION.

The greatest living contrast is between the old Eastern and customary
civilisations and the new Western and changeable civilisations. A year
or two ago an inquiry was made of our most intelligent officers in the
East, not as to whether the English Government were really doing good
in the East, but as to whether the natives of India themselves thought
we were doing good; to which, in a majority of cases, the officers who
wore the best authority, answered thus: 'No doubt you are giving the
Indians many great benefits: you give them continued peace, free trade,
the right to live as they like, subject to the laws; in these points
and others they are far better off than, they ever were; but still they
cannot make you out. What puzzles them is your constant disposition to
change, or as you call it, improvement. Their own life in every detail
being regulated by ancient usage, they cannot comprehend a policy which
is always bringing something new; they do not a bit believe that the
desire to make them comfortable and happy is the root of it; they
believe, on the contrary, that you are aiming at something which they
do not understand--that you mean to "take away their religion;" in a
word, that the end and object of all these continual changes is to make
Indians not what they are and what they like to be, but something new
and different from what they are, and what they would not like to be.'
In the East, in a word, we are attempting to put new wine into old
bottles-to pour what we can of a civilisation whose spirit is progress
into the form of a civilisation whose spirit is fixity, and whether we
shall succeed or not is perhaps the most interesting question in an age
abounding almost beyond example in questions of political interest.

Historical inquiries show that the feeling of the Hindoos is the old
feeling, and that the feeling of the Englishman is a modern feeling.
'Old law rests,' as Sir Henry Maine puts it, 'not on contract but on
status.' The life of ancient civilisation, so far as legal records go,
runs back to a time when every important particular of life was