"Although the Hindoos have adopted from us, various improvements in their manufactures of salt-petre, opium, and indigo, and have made rapid advances in the knowledge of ship-building, practical mathematics, and navigation; yet none of these acquirements have interfered with their religious prejudices. The instant these are touched, they fly off from all approximation to their masters, and an end is put to farther advancement. Nothing is therefore more to be avoided than alarming their jealousy on this head, and exciting the suspicion that Government means, in any manner, to interfere in the business of proselyting. The Brahmins are a very powerful body; they are both an hereditary nobility, and a reigning hierarchy, looked up to with the highest veneration by the inferior casts, and possessed of the most distinguishing privileges: they will consequently oppose with their whole influence any attempt to subvert that system, upon which all their superiority depends. They have already taken alarm at the proceedings of the Missionaries in Bengal, and other parts; and, if driven to extremities, will doubtless excite a formidable disaffection to our Government among the natives. On the contrary, the former wise policy of treating them with respect, and giving a full toleration to their superstitions, was often attended with the happy effect of making them the instrument of enforcing useful regulations in the country; for they have never scrupled, when required, giving a sanction to the orders of Government to suppress hurtful practices, as in the case of sacrifice of children at Sorgur, and in many other instances. We should also be aware that although the comparison between the Mussulmaun intolerance, and our contrary spirit, was so much in our favour, as to have had a powerful efficacy in attaching them to the British Government, knowing that they had only a choice of masters; yet were this difference of policy taken away, their habits and manners, which are more congenial to those of the Mussulmauns, would probably induce them to prefer their government to ours."