administrative connection benefits families, but a strict commercial union between the first manufacturing and the first producing country in the world, would be a solid foundation of strength and prosperity to our whole nation. If this course be adopted, there will, properly speaking, be no separation. A precarious and temporary relation will almost imperceptibly pass into another far more durable and beneficial. Trained by us to happiness and independence, and endowed with our learning and our political institutions, India will remain the proudest monument of British benevolence; and we shall long continue to reap, in the affectionate attachment of the people, and in a great commercial intercourse with their splendid country,[1] the fruit of that liberal and enlightened policy which suggested to us this line of conduct.
In following this course we should be trying no new experiment. The Romans at once civilised
k 2
- ↑ The present trade with India can give no idea of what it is capable of becoming: the productive powers of the country are immense: the population of British India alone, without including the native States, is more than three times that of all the rest of the British Empire. By governing well, and promoting to the utmost of our power the growth of wealth, intelligence, and enterprise in its vast population, we shall be able to make India a source of wealth and strength to our nation in time to come with which nothing in our past history furnishes any parallel.
