distressful condition. Unhappily the feeling aroused is excited against the expounder of facts, not against the facts themselves and all that they reveal. The look of pitying contempt with which the asserter of such a statement is favoured is intended to be withering in its intensity. This is especially the case with the coldweather tourist, who, in proportion to the shortness of his visit and the time he spent in cantonments, holds the most positive of opinions. As the recipient of much incredulity, and more pitying contempt than I care to remember, I have become a connossieur of the manner in which, and of the extent to which, India strikes a stranger. Ninety-nine visitors to India out of one hundred, if not indeed nine hundred and ninety-nine out of one thousand, leave that country with an impression that they have been visiting a land of great prosperity and a people fairly well-to-do and generally

content.

And they are perfectly right in the impression they have formed.

What they have seen fully justifies them in coming to a conclusion calculated to gratify them as Britons and to satisfy them as to the great part which their country and their countrymen have played in bringing India to so advanced a position. The route taken by the ordinary traveller in India-unless he or she be the most difficult to please among mortals-can leave but one impression on the mind. More than seventy years ago Bishop Heber was constrained to write

'Thy towers, Bombay, gleam fair, they say,
Across the dark blue sea.'

A like feeling of admiration takes possession of the traveller before he sets foot on the Apollo Bunder. So far as the unaccustomed heat and ever-attentive mosquito will permit, the feeling is intensified as he passes along the broad avenues with their green umbrageous foliage partly concealing, and in so doing adding to the effect

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produced by, the magnificent buildings on every side. The effect is perhaps greatest when the most magnificent railway station in the world is visited-the Victoria Station, designed by the late Mr. Stevens. A journey to that part of the city occupied by the native inhabitants, with its crowded streets, its busy life, its varied animation, and its general activity brings a new phase of thought. 'All this busy scene is of our creation. This is our work, our work, our work. What do these people not owe to us!' No longer can it be asked as a question involving an impossibility: Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?' Mentally, racially, and patriotically, practically every Englishman who goes to India through its western gate adds not one but many cubits to his stature before he really starts on his journeyings in India. An evening in a bungalow on Malabar Hill, or even an afternoon visit to the Botanical Gardens overlooking Back Bay and the many-towered city, puts the top-stone on an edifice then completely erected in the visitor's mind.

It is thus mentally equipped that the grand tour' through India is begun. Can there be any wonder if the frame of mind thus induced should become almost ecstatic over the many proud evidences of the great good of British rule? For pretty well all the visitor saw in Bombay was the creation and consequence of British rule. As I have said, everything that is seen justifies the strongest feelings of complacency which are certain to be aroused in the stranger's mind. He proceeds on his tour. Everywhere he sees similar proofs of British success. Crossing the great plains of India he may, as he gazes from the railway carriage window, wonder where the agricultural people are to be found. He has been told that India is a land of villages and that eightysix per cent. of the inhabitants are agriculturists. Where, then, are the villages? And, where the people? It is true he sees here and there a collection of mudhuts with little or no sign of life about them, and

concludes that those are ruined villages of which he has read.

Allahabad, Calcutta, Darjeeling, the Northern Indian cities, with perhaps a glance at Madras, and, maybe, Rangoon, are included in the visitor's round. Soon the new impression of our greatness and success wears off. It has solidified into an article of belief, has become a part of irremovable indentation in the grey matter of the brain; an abiding addition is made to the mental equipment of the individual. So it comes about that the stoutest defenders of British rule in India are those persons who have visited that country for a short time. An example of the impression made on the average visitor comes to me whilst this chapter is in preparation.

An English gentleman, who was a Parliamentary representative for some years, who is related to the greatest Parliamentary champion India has known since the days of Burke, visited India during the winter of 1900-1901. He was in that country during the aftermath of what Lord Curzon has called 'the most terrible famine which has ever visited India.' I forwarded to him a copy of my Open Letter to the Viceroy on the Condition of India and its people. On June 24, 1901, this reply reached me :

'I have been a long time in acknowledging the receipt of the paper you were kind enough to send me. Of course I have not the knowledge of the subject to enable me to judge of the question in dispute, but I imagine that those in power are always likely to make out the best case for themselves and the results of their rule. I went to India on a short trip last winter. I spent a few days in Bombay and Calcutta, and visited Darjeeling, Benares, Lucknow, Cawnpore, Agra, Delhi, and Jeypore. I was much interested with the people and very favourably impressed with them. I did not come across any signs of poverty or starvation, and perhaps that was not to be expected in so short a trip. In the native quarters of the cities the people seemed to be industrious and cheerful, and the children seemed plump and happy. I did not notice anything in the villages near the railway line, or in the appearance of the people who were in the fields, to lead me to think that they were in great distress, though, of course, every one could see that they are poor. I was much surprised to see the immense amount of travelling by rail which they do. Whenever I went by an ordinary train the stations were crowded with natives

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one would think that they must have some spare money to pay for this. I did not see any of the great men in India except the Chief Justice of Calcutta, whom I knew here. The military power which holds the country seemed to be very little in evidence. I should like to go again, but probably never shall.'

For an unpremeditated expression of opinion, not written with an eye to publication, the foregoing is a valuable document. Its chief value lies in its absolute accuracy. What is described is true to the life and to the letter. Personally, I should subscribe my agreement with all that is set forth.

But the evidence is valueless; the impression obtained is so misleading as to be wholly false. The writer of this letter-the ordinary visitor to the land called India, following the route described above-did not visit India. The places at which he stopped were British Colonies in India. They were not India itself. There are two Indias; the India of the Presidency and chief provincial cities, of the railway system, of the hill stations, in all of which Britain is as supreme as she is in the chief places of the United Kingdom. This is the India where the people, taken all round and allowing for the circumstances of the respective cases, are as prosperous and nearly as well content as are their brother British subjects in London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Bristol, and Southampton-with this difference, the really rich men in all the Indian cities do not number two hundred, and that, with a trifling exception, all the big salaries earned in the administration— the biggest salaries for like work in all the world—are received by Englishmen, by foreigners. This India, at the outside, cannot affect more than fifteen per cent. of the people. Those people are not seen as Indian people, but as British Indian subjects whose daily bread comes from the political structure made in Britain according to British ideas, and is not an outgrowth of the country's needs or the people's wishes.