30 



spinners of Lancashire and Manchester, and the 

 cultivators of India. 



My object was rather to suggest to those who in 

 England's distress, see India's opportunity, and 

 desire to obtain for her from the present or any 

 similar crisis, those permanent advantages which 

 universal opinion seems to have decided her natural 

 and physical circumstances render her capable of 

 securing, that, looking- at the question from a higher 

 point of view, and in the interest of India, the case 

 is reversed \ and that the principle of non-interfer~ 

 ence, if sound in the one case, will be unsound in the 

 other, in direct proportion to the difference between 

 the state of society in the two countries. And, if I 

 have dwelt at length on the point, it is because there 

 has of late appeared a tendency, on the part of some 

 writers, to carry the laisser-faire doctrine beyond its 

 natural and legitimate limits, a course which, in a 

 country where the first g'rey dawn of modern civili- 

 zation is struggling* hard to make itself visible in the 

 darkness around, would be nothing short of advocat- 

 ing the abdication of one of the most sacred duties 

 of a Government situated as is the British Govern- 

 ment in India. For though, to arrest altogether 

 the onward tide of civilization when once it has set 

 in, is not easy, yet the neglect by a Government of 

 its obligatory functions and what duty can be more 

 obligatory than instruction cannot fail in a very 

 great degree to check its progress. 



All great questions affecting the material pro- 



