ble country." Here a man may purchase land, with
secure title, and of a good tenure, at five shillings the acre; this, at
least, is the upset price, though in some privileged situations it is
known to have reached seventeen shillings. A house may be furnished in the
Morotto style, and with luxurious contrivances for moderating the heat in
the hotter levels of the island, at fifty pounds sterling. The native
furniture is both cheap and excellent in quality, every way superior,
intrinsically, to that which, at five times the cost, is imported from
abroad. Labour is pretty uniformly at the rate of six-pence English for
twelve hours. Provisions of every sort and variety are poured out in
Ceylon from an American _cornucopia_ of some Saturnian age. Wheat,
potatoes, and many esculent plants, or fruits, were introduced by the
British in the great year, (and for this island, in the most literal sense,
the era of a new earth and new heavens)--the year of Waterloo. From that
year dates, for the Ceylonese, the day of equal laws for rich and poor,
the day of development out of infant and yet unimproved advantages;
finally--if we are wise, and they are docile--the day of a heavenly
religion displacing the _avowed_ worship of devils, and giving to the
people a new nature, a new heart, and hopes as yet not dawning upon their
dreams. How often has it been said by the vile domestic calumniators of
British policy, by our own anti-national deceivers, that if tomorrow we
should leave India, no memorial would attest that ever we had been there.
Infamous falsehood! damnable slander! Speak, Ceylon, to _that_. True it is,
that the best of our gifts--peace, freedom, security, and a new standard
of public morality--these blessings are like sleep, like health, like
innocence, like the eternal revolutions of day and night, which sink
inaudibly into human hearts, leaving behind (as sweet vernal rains) no
flaunting records of ostentation and parade; we are not the nation of
triumphal arches and memorial obelisks; but the sleep, the health, the
innocence, the grateful vicissitudes of seasons, reproduce themselves in
fruits and products enduring for generations, and overlooked by the
slanderer only because they are too diffusive to be noticed as
extraordinary, and benefiting by no light of contrast, simply because our
own beneficence has swept away the ancient wretchedness that could have
furnished that contrast. Ceylon, of itself, can reply victoriously