discoursed excellent music, and as night fell the gay parti-coloured crowd, the glancing lights, the tranquil sea, the spangled sky, and dimly outlined island hills formed a picture by which we shall always pleasantly remember Bombay.

CHAPTER XXI.

ENGLAND AND INDIA.

TWENTY-FOUR years ago England undertook to govern two hundred millions of Asiatics on European principles, and if, in accordance with those principles, we admit that only those Governments are good which exist for the interests of the governed, the question to be asked of British rule in India is not, "What has it done for England?" but "What has it done for the Indian people?" Perhaps no man has ever spoken with more authority and liberality on the problem of England's work in India than Dr. Hunter, the statistician of Hindostan, to whose arguments, if not to his very words, it seems to me the duty of every patriotic Englishman to give all the currency he can. For, from the moment when the Queen's sovereignty was proclaimed throughout India, the responsibility for the good government of the country passed into the hands of Parliament, and therefore into those of the British electoral body, who owe to Indian affairs a share of the attention which they give to home politics.

England has been supreme in India for more than a

century, and during this period many remarkable changes, which are wholly due to her acts or influence, have taken place in the country. Thousands of square miles of jungle, once inhabited only by wild beasts, have been converted into fertile land. Malarious swamps have been drained, and are now, in some instances, covered with healthy cities. The remote interior of the country has been joined to the sea-board by railways. Great rivers, once effectually separating provinces, have been spanned. Hundreds of miles of canals have been made, and enormous areas of land have been irrigated. And, apart from these physical changes, others, of even greater importance, have occurred. The native states of India, formerly always at war with each other, are now trading peacefully together. The bloody raids of Afghans, Persians, and Tartars, who, for seven hundred years before the coming of the British, broke through the north-western frontiers of India and ravaged the unhappy plainsmen at will, have been stopped. Piracy has been crushed. Predatory castes, who made a profession of pillage, have been put down. Justice has taken the place of oppression. Instead of a swarming soldiery, there is a police; instead of more idolatrous temples, there are schools.

But England has developed the commercial capacities of Hindostan no less remarkably than she has pacified the country. She has created great trading cities such as never existed in ancient India, whose capitals were

merely the camps of her monarchs, and dependent for their prosperity on the presence of the court. Calcutta has a population nearly double that of any British town except London, and Bombay is one and a half times larger than Liverpool or Glasgow; yet the former was only a cluster of mud huts when our countrymen first settled on the Hooghly, and Charles II. was glad, as we have already seen, to let the latter to the East India Company for a rent of £10 per annum. When the English first became the rulers of India her yearly exports were not worth more than a million sterling, but they rose to a value of eleven millions in 1830, while, in 1880, India sold the world no less than sixty-six millions of her own produce. Besides the enormous extension of cultivation which these figures indicate, India has been benefited by the introduction of manufactures and the opening of mines. Twentyseven years ago there was not a cotton-mill in the country, now there are more than a million and a half of spindles. Jute-mills have been established; papermills are rising, and now we hear of large shoe factories being started at Cawnpore. Coal has been discovered in several provinces, and the mines employ many thousands of hands.

If we turn next to the moral aspect of British rule in India, we find that, although Christianity has made little progress, from causes which will not be here discussed, education has been taken out of the hands of an

ignorant and bigoted priesthood, and two millions of native children are now receiving public instruction, which, while it fits them for the battle of life, frees them also from the superstitious terrors that once held the Indian intellect in bondage, and made progress impossible. Another remarkable result of our influence has been a great revival of letters. Five thousand native books were published in India in 1878, and the vernacular journals now number more than two hundred and fifty, while their readers must be reckoned by millions. Even the family life of the Hindoo is touched by the modern intellectual movement. The zenana itself begins to hear and echo liberal ideas, and there are signs that woman may yet hope to arise from her degradation in India. Finally, the first throbs of a new political life may be detected in the establishment of autonomous municipalities on the ruins of the old village guilds, which had utterly disappeared under the oppression of the Mussulman.

Such is a brief sketch of the work which has already been accomplished by the British in India. It is an agreeable picture, from which one turns with less pleasure to the consideration of what yet remains to be done. The masses of India are, perhaps, the poorest people in the world, a large proportion of the population having outgrown the food-producing power of the country. The very merits of our rule have helped to bring about this state of things, which has become