If we had any great establishment of this sort in which Christians could find employment and the means of religious and secular instruction, thousands of converts would soon flock to them; and they would become vast sources of future improvement in industry, social comfort, municipal institutions, and religion.  What chiefly prevents the spread of Christianity in India is the dread of exclusion from caste and all its privileges; and the utter hopelessness of their ever finding any respectable circle of society of the adopted religion, which converts, or would-be converts, to Christianity now everywhere feel.  Form such circles for them, make the members of these circles happy in the exertion of honest and independent industry, let those who rise to eminence in them feel that they are considered as respectable and as important in the social system as the servants of Government, and converts will flock around you from all parts, and from all classes of the Hindoo community.  I have, since I have been in India, had, I may say, at least a score of Hindoo grass-cutters turn Musalmans, merely because the grooms and the other grass-cutters of my establishment happened to be of that religion, and they could neither eat, drink, nor smoke with them.  Thousands of Hindoos all over India become every year Musalmans from the same motive;[12] and we do not get the same number of converts to Christianity, merely because we cannot offer them the same advantages.  I am persuaded that a dozen such establishments as that of Mr. Thomas Ashton of Hyde, as described by a physician at Manchester, and noticed in Mr. Baines’s admirable work on the Cotton Manufactures of Great Britain (page 447), would do more in the way of conversion among the people of India than has ever yet been done by all the religious establishments, or ever will be done by them, without such aid.[13]

I have said that the great commercial houses of Calcutta, which in their ruin involved that of so many useful establishments scattered over India, like that of Kosi, brought no capital into the country.[14] They borrowed from one part of the civil and military servants of Government at a high interest that portion of their salary which they saved; and lent it at a higher interest to others of the same establishment, who for a time required or wished to spend more than they received; or they employed it at a higher rate of profit for great commercial and manufacturing establishments scattered over India, or spread over the ocean.  Their great error was in mistaking nominal for real profits.  Calculating their dividend on the nominal profits, and never supposing that there could be any such things as losses in commercial speculation, or bad debts from misfortunes and bad faith, they squandered them in lavish hospitality and ostentatious display, or allowed their retiring members to take them to England and to every other part of the world where their creditors might not find them, till they discovered