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their own interests; and looking at . tlie cotton 

 question as one of demand and supply consump- 

 tion and production, it will follow, that the 

 Indian authorities were unmistakably right, both 

 economically and politically, in declining, in the 

 interest of England, to interfere between the 

 cotton 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-interference, 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 

 find ligitimate limits, a course which, in a coun- 

 try where the first grey dawn of modern civilization 

 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 



