treet!
Happy is he, Jonathan, who, contented, knows not the things at his
hand by which his own condition may be bettered. And how blind is that
rule, which, having the power to do good, contents itself with
dragging eagerly away the first compensation. The penalty of the crime
of not developing what is given us by nature for a nation's good is
the sacrifice of a people's happiness. My friend John reluctantly
acknowledged the delinquency. Mark the contrast! Had this
all-bountiful India been ours, a more liberal policy would have
produced results widely different. No oligarch could have sacrificed
it to its own avarice; associations would have sprung up for
developing industry; a policy to make the resources of the state serve
general interests would have been established, and the good of the
many had been kept in view. Cotton-growing, and tobacco-planting, and
rice-cultivating, had been encouraged and fostered. Those rich
alluvial bottoms, so fertile and yet so uncultivated, had given out
their rich harvests to some purpose--untaxed prosperity would have
rewarded the hand of the hardy husbandman. India would then, besides
proving herself the greatest exporting empire in the world, have
clothed, fed and made happy her benighted millions.

"Had India been ours, Yankee enterprise had traversed it with plank
roads; Yankee enterprise had laid down strap railroads until better
ones had resulted from profits; Yankee energy had invented a species
of Mississippi steamboat, wherewith to navigate its narrow
water-courses to their source, and there develope the capabilities of
the country. Yes, Yankee ingenuity had had a steamboat where there
was scarce water for a duck to swim. But why pain the feelings with
recapitulations like these? Its resources are of little value when
government interposes a dogged obstinacy to improvements; nor is it
much better where a people seem at a loss to know whose business it is
to give out the incentive. So long as this state of things lasts will
Cotton remain king, and Uncle John be its most servile and dependent
subject. It matters little that his empire is so beautifully adapted
to its cultivation. He must shake off his love of those very ancient
and effeminating systems of his, and adopt the modern policy of
improving and nourishing industry.

"John admitted things were not conducted on the most approved
principle; but as the business belonged to the old gentleman, who was
very testy in the