The
distrustful criticism with which Englishmen, more than any other
people, are in the habit of scanning the conduct of their country
towards foreigners, they usually reserve for the proceedings of the
public authorities. In all questions between a government and an
individual the presumption in every Englishman's mind is that the
government is in the wrong. And when the resident English bring the
batteries of English political action to bear upon any of the bulwarks
erected to protect the natives against their encroachments, the
executive, with their real but faint velleities of something better,
generally find it safer to their parliamentary interest, and at any
rate less troublesome, to give up the disputed position than to defend
it.
What makes matters worse is that when the public mind is invoked
(as, to its credit, the English mind is extremely open to be) in the
name of justice and philanthropy, in behalf of the subject community
or race, there is the same probability of its missing the mark. For in
the subject community also there are oppressors and oppressed;
powerful individuals or classes, and slaves prostrate before them; and
it is the former, not the latter, who have the means of access to
the English public. A tyrant or sensualist who has been deprived of
the power he had abused, and, instead of punishment, is supported in
as great wealth and splendour as he ever enjoyed; a knot of privileged
landholders, who demand that the State should relinquish to them its
reserved right to a rent from their lands, or who resent as a wrong
any attempt to protect the masses from their extortion; these have
no difficulty in procuring interested or sentimental advocacy in the
British Parliament and press.
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