“We took this country because we had the power to do it. We hold it by might and force, and rule it with a sort of tyranny, a military despotism. We are not here because the people want us. If we did not keep the country by force, not by moral or religious power, but by real brutal force, it would slip out of our hands in a single day. Blink at it as we may, this is the fact and no one can question it. Here then is a force, of one hundred and fifty thousand English soldiers, more or less, sent out at an enormous expense to live by the sweat and blood of these poverty-stricken, overtaxed natives. Only ten per cent. of these soldiers are allowed to marry. A direct violation of the laws of God and nature. It is not enough that the people are taxed to support this great army, they must also provide victims to gratify the,—I will not say brutal, for that would be a libel on even the lowest of the brute creation,—but the foul, inhuman lust of these officers and soldiers. And what is enough to make infidels of all mankind, is that all this is done under a Christian Queen, a woman and a mother, by authority of a Christian Parliament, and executed by the Christian Government of India! By a nation ever ready to parade its civilization, chivalry and Christianity! No wonder that these heathen have so little faith in the Christian religion. I heard an old missionary say that the worst place for missionary work was in the vicinity of a cantonment; that the very lowest heathen were degraded by contact with the soldiers. It is so everywhere. “A writer on Africa says, ‘The farther the traveler advances into the interior, the better is the condition of the natives found to be, less drunkenness and immorality!’ Yet it is pretended that we are holding this country for the glory of God, and the welfare of the people, and that the subjugation of the people of the world by Christian nations is for the promotion of civilization and Christianity! Out on such cant and hypocrisy! The biggest robbers get the loot, and we are the robbers. Why not say so, that we are after the loot and nothing else? Why not be truthful even if we are thieves and not try to cover up our iniquities with a film of religious varnish?” I had no chance to put in a word and did not care to, as I thought he was hitting the bull’s-eye at every shot, but I interjected: “They say that it is necessary to make some provision.” “All rot,” he exclaimed, “it is a slander on humanity. Don’t you know that men can frame excuses and apologies for everything they wish to do? “Why not make provision for men to commit theft, or highway robbery or murder? It is false that men cannot restrain or subdue their sexual passion the same as they subdue their other passions. Are they worse than the brutes? If men are such gross animals that they cannot control themselves, they ought to do as Origen, the saint, did to himself, or as they cripple their fighting stallions.