d interests of
the whole.[11]

If we had any great establishment of this sort in which Christians
could find employment and the means of religious and secular
instruction, thousands of converts would soon flock to them; and they
would become vast sources of future improvement in industry, social
comfort, municipal institutions, and religion. What chiefly prevents
the spread of Christianity in India is the dread of exclusion from
caste and all its privileges; and the utter hopelessness of their
ever finding any respectable circle of society of the adopted
religion, which converts, or would-be converts, to Christianity now
everywhere feel. Form such circles for them, make the members of
these circles happy in the exertion of honest and independent
industry, let those who rise to eminence in them feel that they are
considered as respectable and as important in the social system as
the servants of Government, and converts will flock around you from
all parts, and from all classes of the Hindoo community. I have,
since I have been in India, had, I may say, at least a score of
Hindoo grass-cutters turn Musalmans, merely because the grooms and
the other grass-cutters of my establishment happened to be of that
religion, and they could neither eat, drink, nor smoke with them.
Thousands of Hindoos all over India become every year Musalmans from
the same motive;[12] and we do not get the same number of converts to
Christianity, merely because we cannot offer them the same
advantages. I am persuaded that a dozen such establishments as that
of Mr. Thomas Ashton of Hyde, as described by a physician at
Manchester, and noticed in Mr. Baines's admirable work on the _Cotton
Manufactures of Great Britain_ (page 447), would do more in the way
of conversion among the people of India than has ever yet been done
by all the religious establishments, or ever will be done by them,
without such aid.[13]

I have said that the great commercial houses of Calcutta, which in
their ruin involved that of so many useful establishments scattered
over India, like that of Kosi, brought no capital into the
country.[14] They borrowed from one part of the civil and military
servants of Government at a high interest that portion of their
salary which they saved; and lent it at a higher interest to others
of the same establishment, who for a time required or wished to spend
more than they received; or they employed it at a higher rate of
profit for great com