for her present prosperity, I have no doubt the entire nation will gratefully acknowledge. Fortunately for India, she was not forgotten by the Christian missionaries when they went out to preach the Gospel. While, through missionary agency, our country has thus been connected with the enlightened nations of the West politically, an all-wise and all-merciful Providence has intrusted its interests to the hands of a Christian sovereign. In this significant event worldly men can see nothing but an ordinary political phenomenon; but those of you who can discern the finger of Providence in individual and national history will doubtless see here a wise and merciful interposition. I cannot but reflect with grateful interest on the day when the British nation first planted their feet on the plains of India, and on the successive steps by which the British empire has been established and consolidated in this country. It is to the British Government that we owe our deliverance from oppression and misrule, from darkness and distress, from ignorance and superstition. Those enlightened ideas which have changed the very life of the nation, and have gradually brought about such wondrous improvement in native society, are the gifts of that Government; and so, likewise, the inestimable boon of freedom of thought and action, which we so justly prize. Are not such considerations calculated to rouse our deepest gratitude and loyalty to the British nation, and her Majesty Queen Victoria? Her beneficent Christian administration has proved to us not only a political, but a social and moral blessing, and laid the foundation of our national prosperity and greatness, and it is but natural that we should cherish toward her no other feeling except that of devoted loyalty.”—Carpenter's Six Months in India, Vol. II, p. 73.
Such men, of course, deprecated the Sepoy Rebellion, and lament it to-day as the greatest mistake that their ignorant and fanatical countrymen could have made, and the success of which would have been the doom of India for ages. Bholanauth Chunder speaks the mind of every enlightened Bengalee Baboo when he says:
“In their infatuation they entered upon a bubble scheme, the
