the plaintiff.] immediately, by our solemnity of investigation,
testify our sense of the deep responsibility to India with which
our Indian supremacy has invested us. We make no mention of the
Christian oracles. Yet where, then, have we learned this doctrine
of far-stretching responsibility? In all pagan systems of morality,
there is the vaguest and slightest appreciation of such relations
as connect us with our colonies. But, from the profound philosophy
of Scripture, we have learned that no relations whatever, not even
those of property, can connect us with even a brute animal, but
that we contract concurrent obligations of justice and mercy.

In this age, then, public interests move and prosper through conflicts
of opinion. Secondly, as I have endeavored to show, public opinion
cannot settle, powerfully, upon any question that is _not_
essentially a moral question. And, thirdly, in all moral questions,
we, of Christian nations, are compelled, by habit and training, as
well as other causes, to derive our first principles, consciously
or not, from the Scriptures. It is, therefore, through the
_doctrinality_ of our religion that we derive arms for all
moral questions; and it is as moral questions that any political
disputes much affect us, The daily conduct, therefore, of all
great political interests, throws us unconsciously upon the first
principles which we all derive from Christianity. And, in this
respect, we are more advantageously placed, by a very noticeable
distinction, than the professors of the two other doctrinal religions.
The Koran having pirated many sentiments from the Jewish and the
Christian systems, could not but offer some rudiments of moral
judgment; yet, because so much of these rudiments is stolen, the
whole is incoherent, and does not form a _system_ of ethics.
In Judaism, again, the special and insulated situation of the Jews