, however, only one, though not the least
significant of the momentous changes that accompanied the renewal of the
Charter in 1833.

The trend of events in Europe after the peace in 1815 had tended to
accentuate the profound divergency of views between Great Britain and
the leading continental Powers in regard to fundamental principles of
government, which, dating back to the seventeenth century, had been
arrested at the close of the eighteenth by the exigencies of common
action against the excesses of the French Revolution and the inordinate
ambition of Napoleon. Under the auspices of the Holy Alliance, the
continent of Europe was drifting into blind reaction. The British
people, on the contrary, were entering upon a further stage of
democratic evolution at home, and, under the influence of new liberal
and humanitarian doctrines, their sympathies were going out abroad to
every down-trodden nationality that was struggling, whether in Greece or
in South America, to throw off the yoke of oppressive despotisms. Their
growing sense of responsibility towards alien races which they
themselves held in subjection was manifested most conspicuously in the
generous movement which resulted in the abolition of slavery in our West
Indian Colonies. It could not fail to be extended also to India. Under
Lord Hastings British dominion had again rapidly expanded between 1813
and 1823, when he left it firmly established from the extreme south to
the Sutlej in the north. Then ten years of internal and external peace
had followed in which the educational labours, chiefly in Bengal, of a
generation of great missionaries began not only to meet with unexpected
reward in India itself, but also to stir the public mind at home to new
aspects of a mission which came to be regarded as providential, and to
the moral duties which it imposed upon us in return for the material
advantages to be derived from political dominion. Some of our great
administrators in India were themselves beginning to look forward to a
time, however far distant, when we should have made the people of India
capable of self-government--not yet, of course, on the lines now
contemplated, since even in Great Britain self-government was not
established then on a broad popular basis. As early as 1824 Sir Thomas
Munro, then Governor of Madras, raised in an official minute the "one
great question to which we should look in all our arrangements: What is
to be their final result on the