Thus the Indian government had, in fact, instead of discouraging such practices in the natives, taken up the trade of public murderers, and keepers of houses of ill fame, and that under the sacred name of religious tolerance! A more awful state of things it is impossible to conceive; nor one which more forcibly demonstrates what the whole of this history proclaims, that there is no state of crime, corruption, or villany, which by being familiarized to them, and coming to regard them as customary, educated men, and men of originally good hearts and pure consciences, will not eventually practise with composure, and even defend as right. What defences have we not heard in England of these very practices? It was not till recently that public opinion was able to put down the immolation of widows,[24] nor till this very moment that the Indian government has been shamed out of trading in murder and prostitution in the temples of Juggernaut. Thus, for more than thirty years has this infamous trade at Juggernaut been persisted in, from the startling exposure of it by Buchanan, and in the face of all the abhorrence and remonstrances of England—for more than a century and a half it has been tolerated. The plea on which it has been defended is that of delicacy towards the _opinions_ of the natives. That delicacy thus delicately extended where money was to be made, has not in a single case been practised for a single instant where our interest prompted a different conduct. We have seized on the lands of the natives; on their revenues; degraded their persons by the lash, or put them to death without any scruple. But this plea has been so strongly rebutted by one well acquainted with India, in the Oriental Herald, that before quitting this subject it will be well to quote it here. “The assumption that our empire is an empire of opinion in India, and that it would be endangered by restraining the bloody and abominable rites of the natives, is as false as the inference is unwarranted. Our empire is _not_ an empire of opinion, it is not even an empire of law: it has been acquired; it is still governed; and can only be retained, unless the whole system of its government is altered, by the direct influence of force. No portion of the country has been voluntarily ceded, from the love borne to us by the original possessors. We were first permitted to land on the sea coast to sell our wares, as humble and solicitous traders, till by degrees, sometimes by force and sometimes by fraud, we have possessed ourselves of an extent of territory containing nearly a hundred millions of human beings. We have put down the ancient sovereigns of the land, we have stripped the nobles of all their power; and by continual drains on the industry and resources of the people, we take from them all their surplus and disposable wealth. There is not a single province of that country that we have ever acquired but by the direct influence which our strength and commanding influence could enforce, or by the direct agency of warlike operations and superior skill in arms. There is not a spot throughout the whole of this vast region whereon we rule by any other medium than that by which we first gained our footing there—simple force. There is not a district in which the natives would not gladly see our places as rulers supplied by men of their own nation, faith, and manners, so that they might have a share in their own affairs; nor is there an individual, out of all the millions subject to our rule in Asia, whose opinion is ever asked as to the policy or impolicy of any law or regulation about to be made by our government, however it may press on the interests of those subject by its operation. It is a delusion which can never be too frequently exposed, to believe that our empire in India is an empire of opinion, or to imagine that we have any security for our possession of that country, except the superiority of our means for maintaining the dominion of force.”—vol. ii. p. 174.