India only, that the work must be done. It is there alone that a Committee of Inquiry can hope to hear the truth and the whole truth, regarding those matters which so deeply concern the future of British India, — matters which can be little more than glanced at in this volume. Petitions, newspapers, and pamphlets have gone far to prepare the ground, and much good seed has been sown ; but the harvest-time has not yet arrived.
Happily for the cause, the day has gone past when an Indian speech was the dinner-bell of the House of Commons, — an Indian article the nightcap of newspaper readers. Englishmen have shaken off the antiquated belief that they are not interested in the welfare of the three Presidencies. The philosopher, the political-economist, the manufacturer, the merchant, the ship-owner, and, above all, the Christian, finds an ample field for sympathy and energy in that wonderful land, highly gifted by nature, yet prostrate in superstition and misery.
A country, the greater portion of which has been in our possession for three-quarters of a century ; whose commerce has remained stationary during the last eight or nine years ; whose inhabitants pay in taxes half as much as is collected in Great Britain and Ireland, and yet annually consume no more than one shilling's worth of British goods per head, or one-fourteenth part of the value taken by the inhabitants of Chili and La Plata ; whose entire roads receive no greater outlay than is spent upon the streets and highways of one of our large towns ; upon whose education the annual sum of three farthings per family is dis- bursed ; where railroads, under the fostering care of the Court of Directors, have progressed at the rate of fifteen miles in fifteen years ; A^thin whose colleges, maintamed by a Christian Government, the Holy Scriptures are a contraband thing, — the name of the Saviour a forbidden sound, heard but in stealthy whispers; — such a country as this cannot be an indifferent object to Englishmen in the nineteenth century. Xor is it. India has but to raise her voice, and she will be heard by a people to whom a cry for justice was never yet raised in vain.
Earls Court, Brompton, August 1853.
