our utmost efforts to open up. The old adage that "labour is wealth,"
and that a nation's riches consist in its hardy sons and daughters of
toil, will yet be proved true. Treat this human muck-heap even as you
would ordinary sewage or manure, and who does not know that the very
same putrefying mass of corruption which if allowed to remain near our
doors would breed nothing but fever, cholera, and the worst forms of
disease and death, when removed to a little distance, will double and
treble the ordinary fertility of the soil and produce crops that will
increase the wealth of the entire nation?

And knowing this can we be so blind, even to our selfish interests, as
to treat this human waste in a manner that we should deem the very
height of imprudence and folly in dealing with the other sort? Can we
shut our eyes to the fact that there are moral diseases, more terrible
in their nature, and more fatal to a nation's life, than the bodily
ones, against which we are so anxious to guard, even at the most lavish
expenditure of the public purse? And shall we, in dealing with this
moral sewage, neglect even the most ordinary precautions that we
consider necessary in dealing with the conservancy of our cities?

If on the other hand the problem be boldly and wisely faced, I am
convinced that in India, as in England, General Booth's most sanguine
prophecies will be realised, our most pestilential marshes shall be
drained, our moral atmosphere purified, prosperity take the place of
destitution, and hope that of despair. The millstone that hangs around
our national neck, so that we can barely keep our heads above water,
even when there is not a ripple upon its surface, and that always
threatens to engulf us in perdition at the first symptoms of a
storm,--this millstone shall be converted into an unsinkable life-buoy,
that shall not only support itself upon the crest of the highest waves,