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quire knowledge spontaneously, did suddenly cease and determine, and that it is utterly impossible for any man of a later day, to discharge civil duties in the Punjab without passing a lower and a higher standard, to be fixed by those who have themselves passed no standard at all. Again the labor out of office is added to the increasing labor in office: again the full grown man has to appear as a schoolboy before his equal in rank and intelligence, not unfrequently his inferior in age; is put upon his honor not to cheat, and has to trust his position and his prospects to the tender mercies of young men who have never undergone a similar ordeal. Now we are far from denying the benefit and the necessity of examination tests. But we do not hesitate to say-even now before the tide has turned-that the age has a tendency to become examination mad. In the Borough of Marylebone it was lately proposed to establish an examination test for the medical officers to be appointed to carry out the new Metropolitan Improvement Act. Had not the Times exposed the absurdity, it is probable that experienced practitioners would have had to steal hours from their daily labor to cram subjects, and then to appear in statu pupillari before a board of smart young gentlemen fresh from the Universities, to be examined. The Punjab is, as we have often repeated, the country of extremes, and there is a strong disposition to work an excellent principle to death. For such will surely be the fate of the pet principle of the administrative refor. mers, if those reformers do not moderate their pace. Examine a boy as much as you please: it is the portion of the common human suffering which falls naturally to the age of boyhood. Examine the youth who enters on a profession, but once entered let his work teach him; let the sure law of supply and demand test him; let a real honest love of efficiency on the part of Governments supply the action of that law, should the profession adopted be that of the public service. But let the man alone, nor add artificial burdens to the many which, in India especially, he is only too sure to find. Once commence examining men up to the mark of this and that standard, and there is no absurdity short of which you can logically stop. If the Assistant Commissioner is to be examined again and again up to a certain standard, why not the Deputy Commissioner; why not the Commissioner, why not, pace tanti viri-a Chief Commissioner? A line drawn between boyhood and manhood is natural and intelligible, but all other lines are arbitrary and unjust. Let us not deceive ourselves in this matter, nor sacrifice the real value of the examination test by stretching it too far. If we do, we may attain for a moment apparently favorable results, but the reaction will surely move. The test will be made tighter and tighter; extended farther and farther, till life will be made intolerable, and then some proved abuse, some partiality, some

undue severity such as must sometimes occur, will be the last straw to break the camel's back, and the Government which tried to be righteous overmuch, the system which it was sought to wind up to too high a pitch, will both pay the penalty of artificial pressure. As surely as an age of Stewarts, Rochesters and Nell Gwynnes succeeds an age of Praise-God Barebones and Habbakuk Mucklewraths, so surely will an age of careless appointments, of unblushing nepotism, of official idleness, if not official corruption follow upon an age of these perpetual examinations. An utter abandonment of society to the lawless indulgence of its unchecked humours is the inevitable consequence of the attempt to check those humours at once and for ever, by the zealous but ill-judged application of a quack universal remedy.

So working, so enjoying, so grumbling, so applauding, society holds its course, and life in the Punjab goes on. It is the land of extremes; the land of great heat and great cold, of great physical beauty and great physical hideousness: it contains some of the best soldiers in the world, together with others whom we are unwilling to call the worst it contains men who are over busy, and men whose greatest misfortune it is to be perfectly idle: it is ruled by a Government of rare honesty, of rare energy, of rare ability, but of which the tendency is perhaps still to extremes; in honoring strength to override weakness, in abusing technicalities to overlook what techne meant at Athens; in commanding rough and ready justice to forget that a heaven born Judge never really trod on the mortal side of the Hyperborean mountains; in nobly discarding favoritism to rush into a less offensive but equally dangerous political puritanism.

Besides contracts which may be called its own, the Punjab has a full share in the great contrasts which are common to humanity, which belong to the past, the present and the future. What the past of the Punjaub was the historian will one day relate; we say will relate, not has related, for the history of the Punjab like the history of India has yet to be written. The man of this age who showed by two marvellous fragments that he could have written it, has taken up what Englishmen at least may be allowed to call a nobler subject. To revive the past of Hindostan, to represent the Brahmins not as eccentricities of human nature, as strange incarnations of bigotry and cunning, but as a living acting people predominating over their countrymen by some intelligible ascertainable exercise of moral, intellectual, and physical power, to discard the stupid monotonous revolting details of successive assassination which so confuse and disfigure the existing accounts of early Indian history and reduce out of all one perspicuous consistent narrative; to paint the youthful world conqueror possessed of that frenzy of vitality which he easily per

suaded the vulgar to recognize as a liberal divine afflatus, consciously bent on a conquest not yet to be achieved by Europeans for 2,000 years, unconsciously casting out a great anchor to hold the drifting chronology of Asia, and the world; to bring back that army of Alexander, to the light of day, to set straight featured Greeks standing before the shop of a Punjabee Bunnean; to hear the language of Demosthenes on the banks of the Jhelum; to see those coins passing freely from hand to hand, some of which were destined after a rest of twenty centuries to be dug up as curiosities by British Engineer officers on the Grand Trunk Road; to make us feel as lively an interest in the Court of Akbar as we do in that of William the Third, to redeem the glowing story of Anglo-Indian progress from the repulsive dress of uncouth names and barbarous phraseology, is a work reserved for some future historian distinguished by no less diligence in research, no less fervor in imagination, no less eloquence in description, than Thomas Babington Macaulay.

What the Punjab is in these its critical years of transition from the fatal picturesqueness of anarchy to the dull level of civilization and order, we have endeavoured faintly to delineate. · What the Punjab will be, let a seer or a prophet say. But an ordinary, thoughtful observer of the present may perhaps venture to say so much as this, that the present of the Punjab does, in some slight degree, foreshadow the future-not of the Punjab alone but of all British India. It is not without its significance that we have seen the Political Resident give place to the Civil Chief Commissioner; that we have seen the Magistrate, the Collector and the Judge superseded by the Deputy Commissioner. These are the gradual but sure approaches of a strong Government towards that system of centralization to which by the law of its nature it instinctively aspires. Eight years only have passed since the Sikh Durbar were sitting in the Hujooree Bagh, and yet the British Province of the Punjab is old enough to have afforded a model for the administration of Pegu and the administration of Oude. Other agencies are working in the same direction; the Railway will soon bring the system of Bengal and the system of the Punjab into a state of contrast too apparent to be tolerated by a Central Government. The Telegraph is a fellow worker with the Railway to the same end. The school-master is abroad, employed in removing that Babel of vernacular tongues which is so hostile to progress, in reducing popular language to a centralizing system. The telos of the English in India begins to be visible amid the mists which have so long concealed it; and we may trace the first faint outlines of a vast homogeneous empire founded and governed by the descendants of those men who once were glad to receive Asiatic protection for their rising factories on the banks of the Hooghly. JUNE, 1856.

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ART. VIII.-1. The Asiatic Researches and Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

2. Pritchard's Natural History of Man.

3. Percy's Northern Antiquities. Edited by Blackwell.

THERE are not many amongst us who have not, oftentimes, looked up from the page of ancient history, and longed earnestly to realize, even for one single hour, those strange pictures of quaint pageantry, knighty prowess, feudal state, religious mummery and bloody superstitious rite lying scattered there like faded blazonries which the rude art of the limner made insubstantial enough at first, and over whose colours the dust of ages has thrown so many stains that the gold and the vermillion can alone struggle through to the light, while every dimmer colour of the illumination is lost beyond all restoration by art.

To

Who would not give all his knowledge of the lore of the early Chroniclers, of Paris, and Fabian and Holingshed; of Lingard and Mackintosh-nay even of Strickland and Macaulay, for half a dozen actual glimpses of London in the fifteenth century? see the bodes spur up to Eaorlder's Gate, with dusty tabards and foundered steeds, shouting that the field of Bosworth was lost and torn. To see John of Lancaster prick down Chepe to the maying in Hainault chase, with poursuivants before and Cheshire archers in arriere, the peaks of his boots chained up to the knees of his parti-hose. To hang over the drawbridge by Southwarcke Gate and see the vintners' swans stemming up against the, then, green and sparkling waters of the Thames, seething past between the sterlings; and to look up at the kites billing at Richard Fitz Alaine's head, parboiled, spiked, pitched and iron bound for the edification of his Grace's lieges in general and of traitors in particular. To see a genuine and unmistakeable wizard swum by a discriminating rabble of commons in Perilous Pool. To take a single peep at the cell Little Ease, in the Tower; making up one's own opinion upon the moral and physical good resulting from squeezing a stubborn conspirator in the clutch of the Duke of Exeter's Daughter. And, still again, to take one's stand on the steps of the Chere Reyne's Cross;-to harangue the crowd of Miles Cordwainers and Hob Pewterers who would gather there, gazing at the outlandish stranger with his grossly absurd dress and Latinized Frenchified cant, well nigh past the understanding of good Englishmen ;-to tell them of the wonders of Steam and Gas, the Loadstone, Electric Telegraphs, and Sun Painting, and to hold forth to them upon the advantages of Political Economy and Sanitary Reform, the Errors of Puseyism and the blessings of the Protestant Faith; to be grinned at, and scoffed

at, and then to be pounced upon and pelted as a Lollard and a Sorcerer;-to turn at bay and deal out upon the numbskulls first in attack half a dozen straightforward illustrations of the "manly art of self-defence" as we learned it in the misty dawn of the nineteenth century :-and then, in an instant, to emerge again from the dark age, into one's own good new time, amid the din of omnibuses, under the happy security of the Metropolitan Police Act.

Any one who really entertains a wish of this kind seriously, and who desires to judge for himself how men thought and acted in the Middle Ages, and in many ages preceding them, should come to Calcutta and cultivate a little acquaintance with the Natives under our auspicious guidance. We would shew him, packed together, in the quarters of Shoba Bazar and Sham Pookhur, as closely as were stowed the denizens of the Cité in the time of Henri III., a class of nobles as haughty and as truculent, aye and as crafty and as cowardly too, as were the Orsinis and the Colonnas of the twelfth century; as rooted and as bloody in their hellish idolatries as were the first Druids who placed their Llwyn stones on English greensward: a common people who speak word for word, think thought for thought, perpetrate crime for crime, work stroke for stroke, wear garment for garment, and cling pertinaciously to every superstitious fancy and to every error of an evil faith, even as they talked, imagined, sinned, toiled, dressed, and believed at the time when Solomon trafficked in gold from Ophir and brass from Tyre, and all the richest products, alike of the far East and of our own Cassaterides* were poured into the store-houses of Ezion-Geber.

A few glances at men and things in Calcutta of to-day may well satisfy the most curious enquirer after the realities and fancies of pre-historic times; and will furnish the deeper searcher with facts which are beginning to be recognized as the foundation stones of the history of Europe. It is, assuredly, no accidental coincidence of manners and modes of thinking which forms the link between the Asiatic of to-day and the Northman of remote antiquity.

We have spoken of the Druid, the Italian of the Middle Ages, and the Englishman of the days of the Plantagenets. Here, as examples of some of the strongest peculiarities of all, are-First, a tawny skinned gentleman in shot-satin and pearl ornaments. He is decidedly better educated and more generally well acquainted with Mathematics, Astronomy

* Dr. Daniel Wilson infers, apparently upon strong probability, that, long before Solomon began to collect his costly stores for the temple of Jerusalem, the Phoenician ships had passed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and were familiar with the inexhaustible mineral wealth of Britain.

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