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TO THE EDITOR OF THE “DAILY NEWS.”
Sir,—India, as I said in my first letter, stands on a footing of its own, apart from the other dependencies of our Empire. There we have not only placed ourselves in a position from which it is hard to retire, but taken upon us duties which we are bound for the present to perform. If we were to leave India we should leave it to anarchy. There is no power, Hindoo or Mahometan, to which we could make over our trust. We have destroyed or degraded all the native Governments; and we alone stand in their room. We are wedged in the oak which we have rent.
“The French and Germans,” said Reschid Pacha to Mr. Senior, “think that the strength of England is in India; that if you lose India you sink into a secondary power, like Holland.” “There cannot,” replied Mr. Senior, “be a greater mistake. If we were well quit of India, we should be much stronger than we are now. The difficulty is, how to get well quit of it.”
It is safer to put it thus than to say that we have a “mission” to keep India. Mission is a large word. All sorts of men and nations have missions, and some of their missions are of a very objectionable kind. Spain had a mission, undertaken in a most religious spirit, and sanctioned by the highest religious authority, to send bucaneering expeditions into the New World, and fill it with misery and blood.
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