of England should, at this time of day, have to be informed that they are actually in possession of India! Yet, this is the simple fact. The people of England have been for nearly a century in possession of some of the finest provinces of Hindustan; for these thirty years they have been in possession of the greater portion of the splendid peninsula of India, and yet to this day they do not know it. We say it advisedly, the people of England are ignorant that they are in possession of the most magnificent and important territory that ever became a dependency of another empire. It is true that we hear it said, and repeated in conversations and in print, that India belongs to England; and it is equally true that the East India Company, and a certain class of individuals who are brought up to look to India as the source of wealth and fortune, are well acquainted with the fact, but we repeat it solemnly, that the people of England, as a people, are totally ignorant that they hold so great a country, and have long held it in their hands. What! will any one pretend to tell us, that the people of England, a great, a wise, an enterprising, and philanthropic nation-a nation which is sending out its ships to explore every distant sea; its factors to open up commercial intercourse with every affluent coast, and its emigrants to found new states in every savage desert all the world over-that this great, wise, enterprising, and philanthropic people is aware that it holds at this moment, and has long held the vast regions of India, laying claim to them, indeed, as its particular feof—as lords and heritors of the soil-and yet makes comparatively little use of its advantages? Will it be believed for an instant, that we have there a mighty empire, in extent equal to three-fourths of all Europe, an empire from the point of Cape Comorin to the Himalaya Mountains, offering every variety of climate, and every species of vegetable product; containing one hundred millions of people all willing and desirous to labor in cultivating that prolific soil, or in cooperating in one way or other to pour into this island the natural wealth of those regions, and to take the manufactures of England in exchange-and that the people of England can know this, and neglect this vast means of prosperity, and be indifferent to it? Will it be believed, that we are seeking everywhere for an outlet for our manufactured goods, and that while our artizans are starving by thousands and tens of thousands in the streets, and menacing in their hungry desperation the very existence of our government, we have in India a market capable of taking all the manufactured cottons and hardware goods that all our hands, and wheels, and hammers can furnish, let them be as busy as they may, provided that we will take the simplest common-sense means to have these hundred millions of fellow-subjects employed, and thus enabled to purchase them from us? Will it be believed, that instead of employing these hundred millions of fellow

VOL. VII.

Y

subjects, we go to the Americans and the Portuguese, and to every slave-market that we can find for the very articles they can send us, by the slightest encouragement, three times cheaper? Will it be believed, that the plains of India are capable of growing the finest cotton in quantities to clothe the whole world; that there stand forests of trees capable of bleeding out India-rubber enough for all the purposes of the whole civilized world; that coffee, tea, sugar, corn, linseed, indigo, and a multitude of other rich products of a tropical climate, of the finest quality, at a price astonishingly low may be thence obtained; and that, with all this wealth offered to our hands, we choose rather that the people of England should be in unemployed distress, and the people of India should perish by famine, than that we should take one step towards setting them to work on both sides of the water, and making them happy and prosperous by their mutual labor?

But will it be believed, that far beyond this in absurdity, instead of employing our own subjects in the growth of cotton, we go to the slave-masters of America to purchase it at five times the price that these our suffering fellow-subjects could furnish it to us? That we thus starve our Indian people; destroy them as consumers of our manufactured articles, as well as growers of our raw cotton; raise the American slave-masters into our most formidable commercial rivals; have, in fact, thus created that navy of theirs which has made itself already so formidable, and all those busy merchant vessels of theirs which are to be found in all seas and all ports usurping our commerce and laughing at our stupidity? That sooner than employ our Indian people we now lend money to these American slave-masters to enable them to hold back cotton and enhance its price at their pleasure, and thus, by raising the cost of our fabrics, starve our artizans? Will it be believed, that while we have been laboring for nearly half a century to put down slavery and the slave-trade, and have paid fifty millions to destroy the slave-trade, and twenty millions at one time to purchase the freedom of the slaves in our own WestIndian islands, we still purchase our cottons and other articles from the slave-holders, and have thus encouraged slavery and the slavetrade to that degree, that more slaves are now annually taken from Africa than ever, while all this time our millions and millions of Indian subjects are standing ready to grow us cotton, sugar, and every article of slave-manufacture at a far less cost, and are even perishing for want of that employment by half a million at a time? That, in short, we are actually laboring and paying with one hand every day of our lives to extinguish slavery, and with the other keeping alive slavery by purchasing of the slave-master the products of slavery? That we at one and the same moment are starving our free fellow-subjects and enriching the slave-master: condemning slavery as diabolical, and perpetu

ating it at the expense of our Indian territories, our navy and our commerce? Will it be believed, that we, who are the greatest philanthropists in the world, can know that our Indian people are crushed to the dust by poverty and exaction, and that we take no single step to amend the condition of such vast numbers of human beings under our control? That we who pride ourselves on our commercial and political shrewdness, should know that our Indian empire is a mine of wealth exhaustless, overflowing, and inconceivable, if properly worked, and that we will not so work it, but suffer its resources every day to diminish, and its revenue to sink before our eyes? We say, will it be believed that we know all this and suffer it?

No! no fact is more manifest than that the people of England do not know that India is theirs, or they would know that they held in their hand a talisman by which they could accomplish three of the most stupendous achievements that ever were put into the power of man-remove famine, and the lowest degradation from the millions of India, annihilate slavery at a blow all over the world, and convert the starvation of our spinners and weavers into active labor and fulness of bread-pouring into the heart of England wealth and political and Christian influence in such a stream as with all our energies and greatness, neither she nor any other nation has yet known!

Our language may seem to many the madness of romance; but we shall find no difficulty in proving to the satisfaction of the most matter-of-fact readers,, that it is nothing but the soberest reality. Nay, it is to matter-of-fact men that we desire particularly to address ourselves, for it is not on dreams and fancies but on stern yet astonishing facts that we take our stand. So far from ours being the madness of romance in this case, when the subject 'comes to be fairly understood-when England, indeed, comes to know that she really possesses India, it will then appear to the public, that we have been for half a century laboring under the madness of wilfully shutting our eyes to the circumstance that India was ours: and that we had in it the means to place us at the head of all the civilizers and harmonizers of the world. We did not, as a people, know what we possessed in India-therefore India has become miserable, and a few individuals only here have become enriched by her instead of the nation.

If we are asked how this has come to pass, we answer by our being first engaged in long wars, and then in the domestic embarrassments into which they had introduced us. We were too busy with continental or party warfare to attend to our own affairs, and we deputed the rule of this great eastern empire to a company, and let it slip aside from our observation.

If any one thinks otherwise, let him go to-morrow into society, and ask the best informed people that he can find what they know

subjects, we go to the Americans and the Portuguese, and to every slave-market that we can find for the very articles they can send us, by the slightest encouragement, three times cheaper? Will it be believed, that the plains of India are capable of growing the finest cotton in quantities to clothe the whole world; that there stand forests of trees capable of bleeding out India-rubber enough for all the purposes of the whole civilized world; that coffee, tea, sugar, corn, linseed, indigo, and a multitude of other rich products of a tropical climate, of the finest quality, at a price astonishingly low may be thence obtained; and that, with all this wealth offered to our hands, we choose rather that the people of England should be in unemployed distress, and the people of India should perish by famine, than that we should take one step towards setting them to work on both sides of the water, and making them happy and prosperous by their mutual labor?

But will it be believed, that far beyond this in absurdity, instead of employing our own subjects in the growth of cotton, we go to the slave-masters of America to purchase it at five times the price that these our suffering fellow-subjects could furnish it to us? That we thus starve our Indian people; destroy them as consumers of our manufactured articles, as well as growers of our raw cotton; raise the American slave-masters into our most formidable commercial rivals; have, in fact, thus created that navy of theirs which has made itself already so formidable, and all those busy merchant vessels of theirs which are to be found in all seas and all ports usurping our commerce and laughing at our stupidity? That sooner than employ our Indian people we now lend money to these American slave-masters to enable them to hold back cotton and enhance its price at their pleasure, and thus, by raising the cost of our fabrics, starve our artizans? Will it be believed, that while we have been laboring for nearly half a century to put down slavery and the slave-trade, and have paid fifty millions to destroy the slave-trade, and twenty millions at one time to purchase the freedom of the slaves in our own WestIndian islands, we still purchase our cottons and other articles from the slave-holders, and have thus encouraged slavery and the slavetrade to that degree, that more slaves are now annually taken from Africa than ever, while all this time our millions and millions of Indian subjects are standing ready to grow us cotton, sugar, and every article of slave-manufacture at a far less cost, and are even perishing for want of that employment by half a million at a time? That, in short, we are actually laboring and paying with one hand every day of our lives to extinguish slavery, and with the other keeping alive slavery by purchasing of the slave-master the products of slavery? That we at one and the same moment are starving our free fellow-subjects and enriching the slave-master: condemning slavery as diabolical, and perpetu

ating it at the expense of our Indian territories, our navy and our commerce? Will it be believed, that we, who are the greatest philanthropists in the world, can know that our Indian people are crushed to the dust by poverty and exaction, and that we take no single step to amend the condition of such vast numbers of human beings under our control? That we who pride ourselves on our commercial and political shrewdness, should know that our Indian empire is a mine of wealth exhaustless, overflowing, and inconceivable, if properly worked, and that we will not so work it, but suffer its resources every day to diminish, and its revenue to sink before our eyes? We say, will it be believed that we know all

this and suffer it?

No! no fact is more manifest than that the people of England do not know that India is theirs, or they would know that they held in their hand a talisman by which they could accomplish three of the most stupendous achievements that ever were put into the power of man-remove famine, and the lowest degradation from the millions of India, annihilate slavery at a blow all over the world, and convert the starvation of our spinners and weavers into active labor and fulness of bread-pouring into the heart of England wealth and political and Christian influence in such a stream as with all our energies and greatness, neither she nor any other nation has yet known!

Our language may seem to many the madness of romance; but we shall find no difficulty in proving to the satisfaction of the most matter-of-fact readers, that it is nothing but the soberest reality. Nay, it is to matter-of-fact men that we desire particularly to address ourselves, for it is not on dreams and fancies but on stern yet astonishing facts that we take our stand. So far from ours being the madness of romance in this case, when the subject 'comes to be fairly understood-when England, indeed, comes to know that she really possesses India, it will then appear to the public, that we have been for half a century laboring under the madness of wilfully shutting our eyes to the circumstance that India was ours: and that we had in it the means to place us at the head of all the civilizers and harmonizers of the world. We did not, as a people, know what we possessed in India-therefore India has become miserable, and a few individuals only here have become enriched by her instead of the nation.

If we are asked how this has come to pass, we answer by our being first engaged in long wars, and then in the domestic embarrassments into which they had introduced us. We were too busy with continental or party warfare to attend to our own affairs, and we deputed the rule of this great eastern empire to a company, and let it slip aside from our observation.

If any one thinks otherwise, let him go to-morrow into society, and ask the best informed people that he can find what they know