As the country on which its
maintenance depended was not the one out of whose necessities it grew,
its practical benefits did not come home to the mind of that
country, and it would have required theoretic recommendations to
render it acceptable. Unfortunately, these were exactly what it seemed
to be destitute of: and undoubtedly the common theories of
government did not furnish it with such, framed as those theories have
been for states of circumstances differing in all the most important
features from the case concerned. But in government, as in other
departments of human agency, almost all principles which have been
durable were first suggested by observation of some particular case in
which the general laws of nature acted in some new or previously
unnoticed combination of circumstances. The institutions of Great
Britain, and those of the United States, have the distinction of
suggesting most of the theories of government which, through good
and evil fortune, are now, in the course of generations, reawakening
political life in the nations of Europe. It has been the destiny of
the government of the East India Company to suggest the true theory of
the government of a semibarbarous dependency by a civilised country,
and after having done this, to perish. It would be a singular
fortune if, at the end of two or three more generations, this
speculative result should be the only remaining fruit of our
ascendancy in India; if posterity should say of us, that having
stumbled accidentally upon better arrangements than our wisdom would
ever have devised, the first use we made of our awakened reason was to
destroy them, and allow the good which had been in course of being
realised to fall through and be lost, from ignorance of the principles
on which it depended.
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