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Now there is every reason to believe, on other grounds, that both Hindostan, south of the Ganges, and Africa, south of the Sahara, were separated by a wide sea from Europe and North Asia during the Middle and Upper Eocene epochs.
Who can peruse without interest the accounts of the glorious reign of Alexander; of that man who, issuing from the mountains of Macedonia, riveted the fetters of despotism on Greece, which had grown unworthy of freedom, and carried his victorious arms over the fertile plains of Palestine, till he stood a conqueror amidst the palaces of Persepolis, and finally halted only on the frontiers of Hindostan, arrested in his progress not by the arms of his enemies but by the revolt of his soldiers?
From there it was introduced into Cachar and Darjeeling, and from these places into the hills in the north-western part of Hindostan. In 1850 the English government founded plantations in the Kangra Valley, about one hundred and twenty miles from Lahore, on the borders of Cashmere, which proved so successful that many were soon established in various other localities.
The manufacture of this material was carried on to a great extent in Delhi, there being much demand for the rich and costly fabric among the Princes and nobles of Hindostan.
The whole flood of oriental theory was let loose by this evidence of familiarity with the usages of Hindostan. But it is pretty evident, when we inspect him closely, that the animal, though a strange beast of some peculiar conventional type, is no elephant.
One fact is at the very first extremely startling, that there are nations, such as the inhabitants of Hindostan, known to be one in descent, which nevertheless contain groups of people of almost all shades of colour, and likewise discrepant in other of those important features on which much stress has been laid. Some other facts, which I may state in brief terms, are scarcely less remarkable.
IX. That, in the aforesaid violent and arbitrary position, the said Warren Hastings did avow it to be a public principle of his government, that no right, however manifest, and no innocence, however unimpeached, could entitle the weak to our protection against others, or save them from our own active endeavors for their oppression, and even extirpation, should they interfere with our notions of political expediency; and that such a principle is highly derogatory to the justice and honor of the English name, and fundamentally injurious to our interests, inasmuch as it hath an immediate tendency to excite distrust, jealousy, fear, and hatred against us among all the subordinate potentates of Hindostan.
At the same time, a deafening noise is commenced with musical instruments, and every one begins to shout and sing, in order to smother the howling of the poor woman. After the burning, the bones are collected, placed in an urn, and interred upon some eminence under a small monument. Since the conquest of Hindostan by the English, these horrible scenes are not permitted to take place.
The vast majority of Englishmen concerned themselves as little with America as they concerned themselves with Hindostan. Both were British possessions, and as such important, but both were too far away to assume any very substantial reality in the consciousness of the bulk of the English people.
The Hindoo code, called the Laws of Menu, which is certainly a Brahmin compilation, undoubtedly enshrines many genuine observances of the Hindoo race, but the opinion of the best contemporary orientalists is, that it does not, as a whole, represent a set of rules ever actually administered in Hindostan.
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