unites mankind, is to them a forbidden road.  It is a great gulf fixed between you and them,—­not so much that elementary gulf, but that gulf which manners, opinions, and laws have radicated in the very nature of the people.  None of their high castes, without great danger to his situation, religion, rank, and estimation, can ever pass the sea; and this forbids, forever, all direct communication between that country and this.  That material and affecting circumstance, my Lords, makes it ten times more necessary, since they cannot come to us, to keep a strict eye upon all persons who go to them.  It imposes upon us a stricter duty to guard with a firm and powerful vigilance those whose principles of conscience weaken their principles of self-defence.  If we undertake to govern the inhabitants of such a country, we must govern them upon their own principles and maxims, and not upon ours.  We must not think to force them into the narrow circle of our ideas; we must extend ours to take in their system of opinions and rites, and the necessities which result from both:  all change on their part is absolutely impracticable.  We have more versatility of character and manners, and it is we who must conform.  We know what the empire of opinion is in human nature.  I had almost said that the law of opinion was human nature itself.  It is, however, the strongest principle in the composition of the frame of the human mind; and more of the happiness and unhappiness of mankind resides in that inward principle than in all external circumstances put together.  But if such is the empire of opinion even amongst us, it has a pure, unrestrained, complete, and despotic power amongst them.  The variety of balanced opinions in our minds weakens the force of each:  for in Europe, sometimes, the laws of religion differ from the laws of the land; sometimes the laws of the land differ from our laws of honor; our laws of honor are full of caprice, differing from those other laws, and sometimes differing from themselves:  but there the laws of religion, the laws of the land, and the laws of honor are all united and consolidated in one invariable system, and bind men by eternal and indissoluble bonds to the rules of what, amongst them, is called his caste.

It may be necessary just to state to your Lordships what a caste is.  The Gentoo people, from the oldest time, have been distributed into various orders, all of them hereditary:  these family orders are called castes; these castes are the fundamental part of the constitution of the Gentoo commonwealth, both in their church and in their state.