With regard to the Somnauth gates, a pettier piece of hypercriticism, and a more palpable exhibition of hypocrisy, were never witnessed on a public question.  Two things on this point are as plain as day.

1.  That in retiring from the Affghan country, we were called upon to do so as much as possible in the light of triumphant victors, bearing every mark of military prowess and superiority that could readily be assumed, and inflicting as heavy a blow, and as severe a discouragement on our perfidious enemies, as humanity would permit.

2.  That, the Affghan trophies of Mahmoud’s success were treasured up by his nation as an assurance of continued ascendancy over their Hindoo neighbours; and that, in particular, the redelivery to India of these very gates of Somnauth, were, in negotiations of recent date, demanded by Runjeet Singh as an inestimable boon, and deprecated by Shah Soojah as a degrading humiliation.

Keeping in view these undeniable circumstances, it is clear that the seizure of these Somnauth gates was appropriately ordered as a palpable and permanent demonstration of conquest, and one eminently calculated to encourage the Indian army, and to depress their enemies.

That these gates were connected with the religion of the country, is of no relevancy in this matter.  Every thing relating to Hindoo grandeur is more or less interwoven with religion; but we must take things as they are.  We are the rulers of Hindostan; where the vast preponderance of our subjects and soldiers are Hindoos.  We wish them to be Christians, but they are not so yet; and, until they become Christianized, we cannot hope or wish that they should forget the only faith which they have to raise them above the earth they tread.  Their religion is corrupted to the core; but in its primitive type, after which its worshippers will sometimes even yet aspire, it is not destitute of a high spirituality that would seek to assimilate and unite men’s souls to the Great Being, whom they reverence as the maker, maintainer, and changer of the universe.  Hindooism is more fantastic, and less pleasingly endeared to us, than the paganism of Greece, but it is scarcely more lax or licentious; yet if Fortune, in its caprices, had ordained our Indian subjects to be heathen Greeks, with a Whig Governor-General bringing them back in triumph to their homes, Lord Palmerston, who now, in a mingled rant of mythology, and methodism, talks of “Dii and Jupiter hostis,” would himself have penned a paragraph about the restored temple of Mars or Venus, and would have held up the scruples of Sir Robert Inglis and Mr. Plumptre to classical ridicule.

But it is plain that here no religious triumph was, or could have been, contemplated by Lord Ellenborough.  On this point we need no other evidence than that of Joseph Hume, who, combining the properties of Balaam and his ass, often brays out a blessing when he intends a curse.  He tells us that—­