chants. The Government of India has been an 

 Opium Merchant for years, with great advantage 

 to the revenues of the State ; it is still a Tea Mer- 

 chant with very great prospective benefit to its sub- 

 jects both European and Native, and to the com- 

 mercial interests of both England and India ; and 

 would that, in the latter sense, the Government of 

 India were also a Cotton Merchant, is a sentiment 

 that I am sure will be heartily echoed by every one 

 tvho feels for the lamentable circumstances of the 

 starving Operatives of the manufacturing districts 

 of England, and who takes any real interest in the 

 welfare of India. A historian tells us that an 

 Emperor once set fire to his Capital and sung an 

 ode while the flames reduced it to ashes. It is not 

 true. Nor have we here a parallel. Yet, I honestly 

 confess, that the melancholy reflection such an 

 idea gives rise to, involuntarily occurs to me when I 

 observe people in the middle of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, while grim Famine is stalking outside their 

 doors, with nothing more practical to propose, than 

 a discussion on the abstract principles of political 

 economy, which have nothing whatever to do with 

 the question !* 



When a very much greater quantity of any 

 commodity is thrown on a market, than the buyers 

 in that market require, or will readily carry off, as 



* This is precisely what the Bengal Board of Revenue did 

 when a million of people were perishing for want in Orissa last 

 year : January, 1867. 



