BRIGHTER PROSPECTS FOR INDIA.

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less than six cents a day; and that millions were suffering from hunger because they could not find any employment even at that price. What facilities, so auspicious, were ever before offered for the prosecution of a great enterprise! And what a glorious change will come over India when it shall have been fully carried into effect! Freedom will soon be declared; agriculture will introduce commerce; commerce will introduce science and the arts of civilized life. The necessaries of existence she can produce from her soil, and England will supply her with luxuries. It is not too much to hope, I think, that the time is not far distant when the millions of that mighty empire shall rise from their long degradation, and, clothed in the bright livery of civilization, take their stand among the great family of Christian nations.

But, in glancing over the paragraphs of this letter, many a reader has said to himself, or, if reading aloud, said to his hearer, "All this looks like truth, perhaps; but the author of this book ought to know that England never will adopt a policy which would deprive her of a customer who takes her manufactured goods to the amount of $50,000,000 every year. If England will not buy our cotton, she is more VOL. II.-E

presumptuous even than usual in supposing that we shall purchase her manufactures."

It would impoverish England, without doubt, to lose so valuable a customer, if she could not find another. But losses are not always impoverishment; and in this case they will certainly be gains. If England loses 17 million customers in America, she gains 150 million in India. At the present time the entire consumption of English manufactures in India is only a cent a month for each individual; Jamaica consumes $20 a head annually; Trinidad, $30; Cape Colony, $30; Australia, $40; India, a New-York shilling a year! Let the present plans of England be carried out (and England is quite apt to accomplish what she sets herself about in earnest), and, at the moderate computation of $5 a head (only one sixth as much as negroes just liberated in Trinidad consume), and you have the annual consumption in India of $750,000,000 of British manufactures.

One more item will close what I have to say about India. The planter (if he ever reads this book, and for his sake, as well as my publishers, I hope he will) will say, "Well, suppose we do emancipate our negroes? If what you have said be true, I am a ruined man! For although slavery is an expensive system, yet with free

labour we cannot compete with cotton raised by labourers forced to work for sixpence a day or starve!" I think, my good sir, you are not a ruined man, though you should liberate your slaves; you would expect, of course, to receive compensation for them when given up; and no law, I admit, could justly demand their release without a fair compensation; and the moment you perform so wise, humane, and generous an act, you will find, by experience, the superior economy of free over slave labour. For when your labourer is free, he is on expense to you only twelve hours a day; and he will do the same work as a freeman for less money than he costs you now. And nights, rainy days, Sundays, holidays, sick-days, childhooddays, and worn-out and dying days he is at his own expense, and not yours. And I say farther, as long as you are a high-minded and enterprising American, who has no cannots or impossibilities in his vocabulary, you can compete with an Englishman or any other man who works for a quarter of the money that you will pay your affectionate freeman, attached as he would be to your person. Yes, as long as you have not Americans themselves for rivals, you can raise your cotton and freight your ships with the great staple for Liverpool or the Continental ports, or, better than all, you can manufacture it your

selves, or bring it to the North, and we will engage to assist you. Or the wide world is open for you. Go with the fruit of your honest enterprise to any home of the great brotherhood of man, and God go with you. You are his freemen.

Besides, in any event, England must be dependant upon you for some time to come; do what she will, she cannot consummate her East India project in one year. At present you supply her with your two great staples, cotton and tobacco. And your ingenuity, your skill, your free labour, your easier access by some 9000 miles to Liverpool, and, above all, your unconquered and unconquerable Anglo-American spirit, will still give you the advantage. Give America but a fair, open market, and England dreads her more than any other competitor. But continue your present system, you will gaze on the conflict and see your spoil divided among the strong! With great respect, I am, sir,

and I fear

Your obedient servant,

C. EDWARDS LESTER.

Utica, September 10, 1841.

BRITISH INDIA.

53

DEAR

In this letter I propose calling your attention for a short time to the origin, growth, and abuse of British power in the possessions of the East India Company. I shall only contemplate the subject in some of its bearings, and particularly as it is connected with the question of slavery in those vast and populous regions. The facts which have been brought to light by parliamentary investigating committees, by the testimony of distinguished men who have resided in the East, and, more recently, by the antislavery convention assembled in London, leave no doubt on the minds of candid men who have examined the matter, that slavery not only exists to an enormous extent, but in its most odious forms, in British India; and that the act of West India emancipation by no means exonerates the English government from the charge of upholding this system.

We should probably search the chronicles of the world in vain for an instance in which a civilized nation has inflicted deeper wrong upon any portion of the human race than has been inflicted by England upon the millions of India. If the true history of the British do