29 



board groaning* with delicacies, served by a chef of 

 distinguished merit, it will not follow that all, or 

 even a majority of them, will eat and drink only 

 those thing-s which are good for them, or that the 

 proportion of the twenty that will do so, will be the 

 same, if their number be composed of Eng-lishmen, 

 Frenchmen, Germans, Indians, Chinamen, or any 

 other of the gTeat families which compose the human 

 race. So it is with the business of life ; and it is, 

 consequently, wholly impossible to define, or deter- 

 mine, the proper functions of Governments in the 

 abstract, for it is abundantly clear, that those func- 

 tions which are obligatory in one state of society, 

 will be only expedient in another, probably un- 

 necessary in a third, and possibly mischievous in a 

 fourth. 



When, therefore, I asserted elsewhere, that Go- 

 vernment intervention was necessary to solve a great 

 Indian agricultural question, I had no intention 

 whatever of combating- the abstract doctrine, that 

 matters of business or trade are best cared for when 

 left in the hands of those interested in them. Such 

 undoubtedly is the case where people have all the 

 qualifications necessary to render them the best 

 guardians of their own interests ; and looking- at the 

 cotton question as one of demand and supply con- 

 sumption and production, it will follow, that the 

 Indian authorities were unmistakably rig-lit, both 

 economically and politically, in declining-, in the 

 interest of England, to interfere between the cotton 



