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.
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