The "astonishment" of Lord Dufferin was due to the fact that he was a comparative stranger. The Edinburgh Review remarks, "Nor will the best intentions and the highest administrative principles in India save a government from incessant misrepresentation and violent calumny."*

Extenuation is to be found in the circumstances of the country. People can be expected to measure others only by their own standard. There is also the encouragement that the best men in India give the British Government credit for what it has done, and make allowances for the difficulties which have prevented still greater results.

Nor is this the worst of the evil. Measures on which the wellbeing of the country mainly depends are neglected for politics. The Indian Mirror, a Calcutta daily Native paper, says :—

"The Bengali boy of the period, who is scarcely out of his teens, talks of politics. Such is the case with politics among the Bengalis in Bengal. We are now talking politics to death; and though we are ourselves always in the thick of politics, we must confess that politics has positively become the bane of our society, because we are giving this undue prominence to it to the neglect and at the sacrifice of other questions, in which our present progress and future welfare are materially involved."†

The same remark applies, more or less, to other parts of India. While men of mature age and wide experience may take up politics with advantage, young men will do much better in endeavouring to improve their own minds and in attending to business. The results in Mr. Hyndman's case are not encouraging.

Political reform is far more popular than social or religious reform. It does not involve any self-denial-rather the reverse. Radicalism in England holds out the bait of "three acres and a cow." Here, no doubt, the prospect of a good appointment as the result of agitation is the motive with some. It is admitted that there

are good men who advocate the cause without any selfish ends in view; but human nature is the same everywhere, and the "spoils of office" must have their influence on Eastern as well as on Western Aryans.

An attempt will now be made to enquire into the real results of British rule in India so far as the physical condition of the people is concerned. The writer has no hope of making the slightest impressions upon some.

"A man convinced against his will,

Is of the same opinion still."

Sir William Jones quotes the saying from a Hindu author:

* January, 1884, p. 14.

+ Quoted in Concord, Oct. 3, 1886.

"Whoever obstinately adheres to a set of opinions may at last bring himself to believe that the freshest sandalwood is a flame of fire."

"Any stick is good enough to beat a dog with." Gross misrepresentations which have been refuted again and again, will be re-iterated by pseudo-patriots, and applauded by those who regard any counter-evidence as the "distortion of facts" by an interested "Indian bureaucracy."

The writer does not belong to the "Indian bureaucracy," nor has he any "poor relations" to be provided for. It will, however, be sufficient with some that he is British, to discredit all his statements and to regard his authorities as "rubbish." Still, others may be led to impartial inquiry, and to draw their own conclusions, in which case these pages will not have been written in vain.

When a witness gives evidence in a case, one of the first questions put to him is with regard to his means of information. The writer may be permitted to add a few words on this point. He came out to the East nearly 43 years ago, and there, with the exception of furloughs, he has since continuously resided. His personal observation of India extends from Peshawar to Cape Comorin, and from Moulmain to Karachi. For about 25 years in succession, he has made the circuit of the three Presidencies of India. also travelled in China and Japan.

FALSE IDEAS ABOUT THE PAST.

"The past," Tennyson says,

"shall always wear

A glory from its being far."

He has

The ignorant and half-educated in all ages and in all countries have looked upon the past as the Golden, and the present as the Iron, Age. Ten centuries before the Christian era, Solomon gave the caution, " Say not the former days were better than these; for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this." The poet Horace lived in the Augustan age of Rome, yet there were then "praisers of bygone times." Indians now entertain exactly the same feelings with regard to the declension of their country as Englishmen who talk of the "good old times." Macaulay, in his History of England, thus combats the idea:—

"Delusion which leads men to overrate the happiness of preceding generations."

"In truth we are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveller in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan al is dry and bare; but far in advance and far in the rear, is the semblance of

refreshing waters. The pilgrims hasten forward and find nothing but sand where, an hour before, they had seen a lake. They turn their eyes and see a lake where, an hour before, they were toiling through sand. A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilisation. But, if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman... when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana."

"Since childhood I have been seeing nothing but progress, and hearing of nothing but decay." The evils now complained of are, he says, "with scarcely an exception old. That which is new, is the intelligence which discerns, and the humanity which remedies them."

The words of Burke, applied to England last century, exactly represent the state of Native feeling in this country at present:

"These birds of evil presage at all times have grated our ears with their melancholy song; and by some strange fatality or other, it has generally happened that they have poured forth their loudest and deepest lamentations at the periods of our most abundant prosperity."*

The Hindus are specially liable to entertain false notions of the past. The Cambridge Professor of Sanskrit says, "The very word history has no corresponding Indian expression. From the very earliest ages down to the present times, the Hindu mind seems never to have conceived such an idea as an authentic record of past facts based on evidence." Poetry and books like the Vishnu Purana have furnished their ideas of bygone days.

PROGRESS UNDER BRITISH RULE.

Under this head will be mentioned several points, showing that the condition of the country has improved since it came under the British Government.

1. War has been replaced by Peace.-Before the commencement of British rule, as Lord Dufferin said at Ajmere, "scarcely a twelvemonths passed without the fair fields of India being watered with the blood of thousands of her children." The Rig Veda shows abundantly the fierce contests between the Aryan invaders and the aboriginal Dasyus. Indra, after being invited by the former to "quaff the soma juice abundantly," was urged to destroy their * Quoted in Finances and Public Works of India, p. 12.

enemies: "Hurl thy hottest thunderbolt upon them! Uproot them! Cleave them asunder !"

"Sometimes an Aryan leader fought with an Aryan leader. The cause of such a civil dissension might be jealousy or ambition...... The war of invasion lasted for centuries."*

As already mentioned, India has no history properly so called. The legends, however, indicate sanguinary struggles. "Thrice seven times did Parasurama clear the earth of the Kshatriya caste, and he filled with their blood five large lakes." The great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, relates a succession of battles, ending in the almost entire destruction of the contending parties.

The country was divided into a number of kingdoms, leading to frequent wars. Dynasty after dynasty succeeded each other.

About 520 B. c. Darius, King of Persia, invaded India, and annexed part of the country. His success probably led Alexander the Great to follow his example in 327 B. c. For more than 800 years there was a struggle against Greco-Bactrian and Scythian inroads. Chandra Gupta and Vikramaditiya partly won their fame by successfully contending with the invaders.

The numerous invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni are well known. They were followed by a long series of similar expeditions.

"India," says Dr. Hunter, " has, at its north-eastern and northwestern corners, two opposite sets of gateways which connect it with the rest of Asia. Through these gateways, successive hordes of invaders have poured into India, and in the last century the process was still going on. Each set of new-comers plundered and massacred without mercy and without restraint. During 700 years, the warring races of Central Asia and Afghanistan filled up their measure of bloodshed and pillage to the full. Sometimes they returned with their spoil to their mountains, leaving desolation behind; sometimes they killed off or drove out the former inhabitants and settled down in India as lords of the soil; sometimes they founded imperial dynasties destined to be crushed, each in its turn, by a new host swarming into India through the Afghan passes.

"The precise meaning of the word invasion in India during the last century may be gathered from the following facts. It signified not merely a host of twenty to a hundred thousand barbarians on the march, paying for nothing, and eating up every town, and cottage, and farmyard; burning and slaughtering on the slightest provocation, and often in mere sport. It usually also meant a grand final sack and massacre at the capital of the invaded country. The plan of the Russian general Skobeloff for the invasion of India was as follows:

"It would be our chief duty to organise masses of Asiatic cavalry, Kunte's Vicissitudes of Indian Civilization, p. 121.

B

and hurling them on India as our vanguard under the banner of blood and rapine, thus bring back the days of Tamerlane."

Tennyson, in his recent poem, thus refers to Tamerlane, or Timur :

:

66

Ages after, while in Asia, he that led the wild Moguls,

Timur built his ghastly tower of eighty thousand skulls."

A brief account of Tamerlane's doings in India will explain what Skobeloff proposed.

In 1398 Timur (Tamerlane) entered India at the head of a vast Tartar horde. He defeated Mahmud Tughlak under the walls of Delhi, and entered the capital. For five days the city was given up to plunder and massacre, during which Timur was employed in giving a grand entertainment to his officers. Some streets were rendered impassable by heaps of dead. Part of the inhabitants had fled for safety to old Delhi. The Muhammadan historian says that Timur's men followed them, and "sent to the abyss of hell the souls of these infidels, of whose heads they erected towers, and gave their bodies for food to the birds and beasts of prey. Never was such a terrible slaughter and desolation heard of." Timur and his army next took Meerut. The same Muhammadan writer says, "They flayed alive all the infidels of this place, they made slaves of their wives and children; they set fire to everything, and razed the walls; so that this town was soon reduced to ashes."*

During last century, in the space of twenty-three years, six inroads took place on a large scale.

"The first was led by a soldier of fortune from Persia, who slaughtered Afghan and Indian alike; the last five were regular Afghan invasions.

"On this first of the six invasions, 8000+ men, women, and children were hacked to pieces in one forenoon in the streets of Delhi. But the Persian general knew how to stop the massacre at his pleasure. The Afghan leaders had less authority, and their five great invasions during the thirteen middle years of the last century form one of the most appalling tales of bloodshed and wanton cruelty ever inflicted on the human race. In one of these invasions, the miserable capital, Delhi, again opened her gates and received the Afghans as guests. Yet for several weeks, not merely for six hours on this occasion, the citizens were exposed to every foul enormity which a barbarian army could practise on a prostrate foe. Meanwhile the Afghan cavalry were scouring the country, slaying, burning and mutilating in the meanest hamlet as in the greatest town. They took especial delight in sacking the holy places of the Hindus, and murdering the defenceless votaries at the shrines. For example, one gang of 25,000 Afghan horsemen swooped down upon the sacred city of Muttra during a festival, while it was thronged with peaceful Hindu pilgrims engaged in their devotions. They

History of Timur Beg by Cherefeddin Ali.

+ So Scott. Elphinstone thinks 30,000 nearer the truth.