A house may be furnished in the Morotto style, and with luxurious contrivances for moderating the heat in the hotter levels of the island, at fifty pounds sterling.  The native furniture is both cheap and excellent in quality, every way superior, intrinsically, to that which, at five times the cost, is imported from abroad.  Labour is pretty uniformly at the rate of six-pence English for twelve hours.  Provisions of every sort and variety are poured out in Ceylon from an American cornucopia of some Saturnian age.  Wheat, potatoes, and many esculent plants, or fruits, were introduced by the British in the great year, (and for this island, in the most literal sense, the era of a new earth and new heavens)—­the year of Waterloo.  From that year dates, for the Ceylonese, the day of equal laws for rich and poor, the day of development out of infant and yet unimproved advantages; finally—­if we are wise, and they are docile—­the day of a heavenly religion displacing the avowed worship of devils, and giving to the people a new nature, a new heart, and hopes as yet not dawning upon their dreams.  How often has it been said by the vile domestic calumniators of British policy, by our own anti-national deceivers, that if tomorrow we should leave India, no memorial would attest that ever we had been there.  Infamous falsehood! damnable slander!  Speak, Ceylon, to that.  True it is, that the best of our gifts—­peace, freedom, security, and a new standard of public morality—­these blessings are like sleep, like health, like innocence, like the eternal revolutions of day and night, which sink inaudibly into human hearts, leaving behind (as sweet vernal rains) no flaunting records of ostentation and parade; we are not the nation of triumphal arches and memorial obelisks; but the sleep, the health, the innocence, the grateful vicissitudes of seasons, reproduce themselves in fruits and products enduring for generations, and overlooked by the slanderer only because they are too diffusive to be noticed as extraordinary, and benefiting by no light of contrast, simply because our own beneficence has swept away the ancient wretchedness that could have furnished that contrast.  Ceylon, of itself, can reply victoriously to such falsehoods.  Not yet fifty years have we held this island; not yet thirty have we had the entire possession of the island; and (what is more important to a point of this nature) not yet thirty have we had that secure possession which results from the consciousness that our government is not meditating to resign it.  Previously to Waterloo, our tenure of Ceylon was a provisional tenure.  With the era of our Kandyan conquest coincides the era of our absolute appropriation, signed and countersigned for ever.  The arrangements, of that day at Paris, and by a few subsequent Congresses of revision, are like the arrangements of Westphalia in 1648—­valid until Christendom shall be again convulsed to her foundations.  From that date is, therefore, justly to be inaugurated our English