The Letters of Warren Hastings to His Wife: Transcribed in Full From the Originals in the British Museum (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Letters of Warren Hastings to His Wife: ...)
Excerpt from The Letters of Warren Hastings to His Wife: Transcribed in Full From the Originals in the British Museum
Warren hastings was Governor of India. He treated the natives very cruelly, and was impeached.
This sentence, with slight variations in phraseology and Spelling, confronted the present writer conspicuously, a year or two ago, on the first sheet of every set of answers to a certain examination-paper. The victims had been invited, with the large and airy generosity of examination papers intended for the very young, to say What they knew about Warren Hastings, and with rash confidence they had assumed that here at any rate was a ques tion they could answer. Diluted Macaulay, filtered through the minds of governesses into those of girls, was the verdict of the moment, but upon re?ection, a curious fact leaped into prominence. Not one of the youthful historians knew - or appeared to know - that Hastings was triumphantly acquitted on every Charge brought against him. Even Macaulay does not attempt to deny the fact, though he does his best to minimise its significance, so that it can hardly have been omitted from their teaching. How is it that it had so completely escaped their memories 1' Further experience has induced the conclusion that the same limitation of knowledge exists widely in a more surprising quarter. We know the verdict, writes, with unconscious mendacity, a reviewer in a great daily, the name of which it were charity to withhold, and in the main nothing yet adduced has ever availed to shake the opinion of the majority in its justice. Certainly not.
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