Let me direct your attention now to another point which I never think of without feelings which words would altogether fail to express.  You hear constantly that woman, the helpmate of man, who adorns, dignifies, and blesses our lives, that woman in this country is cheap; that vast numbers whose names ought to be synonyms for purity and virtue are plunged into profligacy and infamy.  But do you not know that you sent 40,000 men to perish on the bleak heights of the Crimea, and that the revolt in India, caused, in part at least, by the grievous iniquity of the seizure of Oude, may tax your country to the extent of 100,000 lives before it is extinguished; and do you know that for the 140,000 men thus drafted off and consigned to premature graves, nature provided in your country 140,000 women?  If you have taken the men who should have been the husbands of these women, and if you have sacrificed L100,000,000, which as capital reserved in the country would have been an ample fund for their employment and for the sustentation of their families, are you not guilty of a great sin in involving yourselves in such a loss of life and of money in war, except on grounds and under circumstances which, according to the opinion of every man in the country, should leave no kind of option whatever for your choice?

I know perfectly well the kind of observations which a certain class of critics will make upon this speech.  I have been already told by a very eminent newspaper publisher in Calcutta, who, commenting on a speech I made at the close of the session, with regard to the condition of India and our future policy in that country, said, that the policy I recommended was intended to strike at the root of the advancement of the British Empire, and that its advancement did not necessarily involve the calamities which I pointed out as likely to occur.  My Calcutta critic assured me that Rome pursued a similar policy for a period of eight centuries, and for those eight centuries she remained great.  Now, I do not think that examples taken from pagan, sanguinary Rome are proper models for the imitation of a Christian country, nor would I limit my hopes of the greatness of England even to the long duration of 800 years.  But what is Rome now?  The great city is dead.  A poet has described her as ’the lone mother of dead empires’.  Her language even is dead.  Her very tombs are empty; the ashes of her most illustrious citizens are dispersed—­

  The Scipios’ tomb contains no ashes now.

Yet I am asked, I, who am one of the legislators of a Christian country, to measure my policy by the policy of ancient and pagan Rome!