Well, now I come down to the year 1832, and I have then the report of another Member of Council, and beg every working man here, every man who is told that there is nobody to blame, to listen to one or two extracts from the report. Mr. Warden, Member of the Council, gave evidence in 1832 that the money-tax levied on Surat cotton was 56 rupees per candy, leaving the grower only 24 rupees, or rather less than 3/4_d_. per pound. In 1846 there was so great a decay of the cotton-trade of Western India, that a committee was appointed in Bombay, partly of Members of the Chamber of Commerce and partly of servants of the Government, and they made a report in which they stated that from every candy of cotton-- a candy is 7 cwt. or 784 lbs.--costing 80 rupees, which is 160 shillings in Bombay, the Government had taken 48 rupees as land-tax and sea-duty, leaving only 32 rupees, or less than 3/4_d_. per pound, to be divided among all parties, from the Bombay seller to the Surat grower. In 1847 I was in the House of Commons, and I brought forward a proposition for a select committee to inquire into this whole question; for in that year Lancashire was on the verge of the calamity that has now overtaken it; cotton was very scarce, for hundreds of the mills were working short time, and many were closed altogether. That committee reported that, in all the districts of Bombay and Madras where cotton was cultivated, and generally over those agricultural regions, the people were in a condition of the most abject and degraded pauperism; and I will ask you whether it is possible for a people in that condition to produce anything great, or anything good, or anything constant, which the world requires? It is not to be wondered at that the quality of the cotton should be bad--so bad that it is illustrated by an anecdote which a very excellent man of the Methodist body told me the other day. He said that at a prayer-meeting, not more than a dozen miles from where I live, one of the ministers was earnest in supplication to the Supreme; he detailed, no doubt, a great many things which he thought they were in want of, and amongst the rest, a supply of cotton for the famishing people in that district. When he prayed for cotton, some man with a keen sense of what he had suffered, in response exclaimed, 'O Lord! but not Surat.' Now, my argument is this, and my assertion is this, that the growth of cotton in India,--the growth of an article which was native and common in India before America was discovered by Europeans,--that the growth of that article has been systematically injured, strangled, and destroyed by the stupid and wicked policy of the Indian Government.