Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the great authorities just mentioned, than to the political ignorance and apathy of the Indian people. That contemptuous policy may be pursued too far. Too much reliance may be placed on the apparent apathy of a people not encouraged or accustomed to tell us their feelings. The ignorance, also, may be less than we suppose. And after all, what safety is there in popular ignorance ? Judging from historical experience, we should rather look upon it as a constant danger, most effectually tempered and restrained by extreme veneration for the persons and pageantry of hereditary Princes. I trust I shall not be misinterpreted, or misunderstood, from anything I have said in the preceding section, as advising that the Nawab of the Carnatic should be reinstated, in order to conciliate the Southern Mahomedans, and avert their fanatical hostility, or in order to prevent a mutiny in the Madras Army. I do not profess to see any immediate cause for anxiety. I am not one of those who believe in blood-thirsty fanaticism as an ordinary characteristic of the Mussulman faith. I no more believe the Rebellion of 1857 to have been the result of a Mussulman plot, than I believe it to have been a mere military mutiny. I am, in fact, much less of an alarmist than many of the most distinguished public servants, now actively employed in India. For example, Sir Richard Temple, then Resident at Hyderabad, in a despatch of the 16th August, 1867, from which I shall have to quote several passages of a more agreeable nature, writes as follows :— An able writer with whom I seldom have the good luck to agree, in an article of the Edinburgh Review for October 1866, on which I have made some comments elsewhere, (Retrospects and Prospects of Indian Policy, pp. 227, 235) has collected with great care some in...