This reflection has somewhat damped our pleasure in perusing Mr Cameron’s eloquent and high-toned address. We devoutly hope to see our misgivings proved to be groundless; but in the mean time we must give one or two of our reasons for doubting whether the day is at hand when the natives of England and India may meet on terms of perfect parity in every walk of life. In the first place, to judge by precedent, we doubt the strict applicability to the present question of that drawn from the practice of ancient Rome. Of the people subjugated by Rome, a vast proportion were of the same race as their victors, with no peculiarities, personal or complexional, to check the amalgamation resulting from popular intermarriage. It is in Egypt that the closest similarity to our situation in India is likely to be found, and, judging by the contemptuous tone of Juvenal’s allusion to the people of that country in his 15th Satire, we can hardly imagine that, when employed in any public capacity, the “imbelle et inutile vulgus” were placed exactly on the same footing as the Roman knights who constituted the “covenanted service” of those days in that particular province. The geographical circumstances were also different. Rome grew like a tree—its root in the eternal city, its branches stretching forth in continuous lines to the furthest extremities of its vast domain. Our Indian empire springs from a transplanted offshoot of the parent State. No one part of it has a firmer hold on the soil than another. It is all equally loose. Our dominion is, in fact, based upon our ships, and it is to our ships that both Englishmen and natives, in touching on the possibility of our eventual downfall, always speak of our retreating or being driven. From our ships we sprung, and to our ships we shall some day perhaps return. It is in vain, therefore, to draw, from the practice of a purely continental empire like that of Rome, rules for the government of an essentially maritime dominion such as we have established on the Ganges. Ours is a power without a precedent, and perhaps, therefore, without a prognostic. There is nothing like it in the past, and its future will probably be stamped with the same singularity as has characterised its whole existence.