For 20 years I have, as a missionary, been in close and confidential intercourse with Natives of all classes. Often and often has my spirit been harrowed and almost crushed by a close view of the condition of the ryot, his wants and his sufferings; shut out from that ability to read, without which the pages of inspiration are locked up to him. I can see in the improvement of his social condition a means of enabling him to enjoy the light of knowledge. I have circulated many pamphlets in England on "The ryot, his teachers, and torturers," and on the evils resulting from the ryots not having a sound Vernacular education. When I have not shrunk from exposing many social evils to which the ryot is subject, I beg to submit, could I have avoided, in my position, exposing his suffering from the Indigo system.
(The Chief Justice here stopped Mr. Long, stating that the Court were willing to hear anything that he had to address to them in his defence. That it was not the length of the matter he was now reading but its substance they objected to as irrelevant. The remainder we give as from the MS. prepared by Mr. Long.)
Influential men in England have deeply sympathised with me on these points, and have said "You and others that expose those recesses of human suffering and degradation must let us know the results," and I have been, my Lord, amongst those masses for years, and hope, as long as I live, have a brain to think and a pen to write, to advocate the social elevation of the masses as incidental with the progress of mental and moral light. Should I not have been a traitor to the religion I professed, whose great founder's motto is, "The poor have the Gospel preached to them," had I not availed myself of all legitimate opportunity to bring the wants and sufferings of the ryots, and the feelings and views of Natives generally to the notice of men who had the power of remedying them? It may be called too political a course, as some now unduly restrict that term; but Christianity itself is political in the extended sense; for in the early ages it assailed the slavery of the Roman Empire; in the middle ages it afforded an asylum to the serfs against the oppressions of the feudal chiefs; at the period of the Reformation it brought freedom to the peasants' home; and in modern days it has abolished slavery in the West Indies. It has protested against American slavery, and is
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