By a policy of conciliation and confidence we might secure their ungrudging and hearty support against all enemies of the Empire.

But while the princes are remembered the peasants must not be forgotten, as is apt to be the case in all countries, and particularly in India. While Rajas were feasting at Delhi raiyats were famishing in the Deccan. It is unfortunate that upon this occasion the responsibility must rest upon English shoulders, and that the reckless emulation in extravagance, to which orientals are naturally so prone, was in a great measure forced upon the Rajas by superior order. When in the Nizam's dominions, shortly after the Delhi assemblage, and just as the famine in those regions was beginning to assume alarming proportions, I found that various useful and ornamental works undertaken by Sir Salar Jung had been recently discontinued. Upon inquiring the reason I was informed that it would not do to burn the candle at both ends, and that the expenses of the young Nizam's involuntary expedition to northern India had been enormous.

At a later date, when the famine in the Deccan was at its height, Baroda, the Gaekwar's capital, was the scene of prolonged festivities, for which the British authorities must be held responsible, as well as their nominee Sir T. Madava Rao, and which were calculated to set a pernicious example of ill-timed extravagance.

Native Opinion, a newspaper published in English and Maráthi, on the 11th of March, 1877, thus alludes to these proceedings, affording a good specimen of the intelligent and vigorous criticism to be found in the columns of the native press :

It has passed into a proverb in India, As is the king, so are his subjects.' The great moulders of fashion and elevators of ideas and notions about good and bad, proper and improper, are now the high dignitaries of the British Empire. But since there is little community of feeling as well as social intercourse between the rulers and the ruled, any lâches and failings of theirs do not exercise such a pernicious influence upon the Indian masses as do those of the leaders of Indian societies. Whatever their faults, our princes, chiefs, and nobles must for a long time to come continue to wield a very great influence either for good or for evil. They are at present relieved of all care for the existence of their rank and possessions. If they were, therefore, to apply themselves to raising up the Indian masses socially, morally, and materially, they would keep up their positions and prove the greatest benefactors of the country. Unfortunately, however, this is not the case. The security which our princes and nobles now enjoy seems to have done them harm rather than good. Few of them know ambition or enjoyment except what their animal nature dictates to them. Therefore, when a well-trained and brought-up prince succeeds his father, or when a gentleman of ability and education is appointed to a Dewanship, the event is hailed with joy by the people and particularly by the educated classes.

We have been led into these remarks by the festivities which have just now come to an end at Baroda. Notwithstanding the injustice done to Malharrao, we thought the new order of things at Baroda would do good not only to that state, but also to other native sovereignties in India; that the name of Rajah Sir T. Madhavrao was a guarantee that a manly and vigorous tone would be imparted to the administration. But what do we find instead? Worship of the powerful seems to be cultivated at Baroda, with as much assiduity as elsewhere. A honeyed tongue and anxiety to please the great, is the bane of Indian populations.

It is remarkable to read in a native journal of the present day words almost identical in effect with those used by Sir John Malcolm, who was Governor of Bombay about half a century ago. He says of the Rajput chiefs in the peninsula of Kutch :

Secure in our protection, and freed by it from all supervision or responsibility in the management of their estates, the Járejá chiefs have become indolent and indifferent to all matters that do not affect their personal interest. Lost in the enjoyment of sensual pleasures, they neglect all improvement, and endeavour to supply funds for such a course of life by every means of oppression and outrage they can venture upon without the hazard of their property.

This is the dark side of the picture, and illustrates the evils which may result, and in many cases undoubtedly have resulted, from the British protectorate; but the case of Kutch is somewhat peculiar, both geographically and politically.

This province is rather an island than a peninsula during that large portion of the year when the Runn, a great salt lake, is flooded, and is at other seasons almost as completely insulated by the desert as by the sea. The British Government in 1819 undertook by treaty to maintain the peace in Kutch against foreign and domestic foes, and thereby released the inferior feudatory chiefs from the burden of military service due by them to the Rao, their suzerain. At the same time the entire cost of British intervention was thrown upon the Rao in the form of tribute, and the maintenance of a military contingent, while he was also obliged to defray, with the aid of a few insignificant pecuniary contributions from his numerous Bháyád or kindred chiefs, all the expenses of administering the country. Thus, to compare small things with great, the Rao of Kutch holds towards his Bháyád a position resembling that of the British Government towards the protected princes throughout the Empire, but he is only the intermediate superior, and he bears the military expenses without wielding any military power, so that his position is less favourable than that of native chiefs in general.

Very serious difficulties have resulted in Indian politics from the incautious use of words, and the impossibility of accurately translating into English such terms as: Bháyád, Khálsa, Girásiá, Zamindár, Tálukdár, Ráiyat, and Darbár, &c.

Frerage, kindred, feudatory, vassal, sub-vassal, subject, suzerain, seignorial, superior, paramount, and similar feudal or legal terms have been used as translations, conveying at least approximately correct ideas. Such terms are of course useful, if employed with care, but grave practical blunders have been the consequence of acting upon notions of European feudalism, altogether foreign to the social conditions of India.

The natives of India hardly appreciate the new-fangled merits of British rule; they are genuine conservatives, and seem to prefer an ancient evil to a modern reform, liking to be misgoverned by their

own people in the old-fashioned style. Of a wilful desire to oppress they are ready to acquit the Sahebs themselves, but not the Saheb's 'native subordinates,' and they dislike intensely the expensive and cumbrous machinery for administering what we consider to be justice. Our Civil Courts' are regarded as institutions for enabling the rich to grind the faces of the poor, and many are fain to seek a refuge from their jurisdiction within native territory. The very acts on which we rely for securing popular goodwill, are frequently productive of bitter discontent, because we are out of sympathy with native feelings, customs, and modes of thought. At the same time our temperament and our motives of action are inscrutable to the natives, and the great gulf fixed between the two races remains unbridged. Then the costliness of our Government involves the necessity of perpetually trying to discover or invent new methods for raising money, and the inhabitants of the British provinces are kept in constant dread of some new turn of the fiscal screw. Looking back upon the good old times previous to annexation, they are apt to think of a former ruler as 'a tyrant-but our masters then were still at least our countrymen.' Even the capricious tyranny of a native chief is less galling to a native community, however severely it may strike individuals, than the even, unrelaxing pressure of our rule. At this time, moreover, the native States enjoy exemption from those reactionary and vexatious measures, in the conception of which the Government of the present Viceroy have been so prolific, and of which the enactment against the press furnishes the latest example. In a letter recently received from India a rative gentleman of very high distinction gives expression to the prevalent dissatisfaction by saying: 'I see no hope of improvement here so long as Government is bent on endless legislation; in the present state of the Council at Calcutta anything may pass.' The most urgent reform in India, indeed, appears to be reform of the Legislative Councils.

DAVID WEDderburn.

A MODERN 'SYMPOSIUM.'

IS THE POPULAR JUDGMENT IN POLITICS MORE JUST THAN THAT OF THE HIGHER ORDERS?

MR. W. R. GREG.

Mr. Gladstone's proposition as understood by Lord Arthur Russell, and indeed as originally enunciated by himself, seemed startling and questionable enough. As it promises to issue from the alembic of this discussion-guarded and mitigated in its terms, limited in its scope, interpreted and exemplified by Mr. Hutton, and modified by the suggestions of more cautious but still sympathetic minds-it seems impossible to deny to it a considerable measure of suggestive, encouraging, and prolific truth, for which it is well worth while to secure a less loose and excessive, and a more precise expression.

Probably it will be found that the essence and sound kernel of the broad proposition we are criticising may be reduced to the following dimensions:-that the mass, the populace, the uneducated classes, are in their political views and conclusions more guided by impulse and less by reflection than those above them in the social scale; that they look rather to the larger and more obvious, which are often the more essential, points of a question, than to its minor and modifying features; that their sympathies are, if not always truer, at least prompter, keener, more unqualified, more imperious than those of the higher orders. Nay, we may perhaps go further and recognise that they are as a rule-certainly often-more generous and hearty in those sympathies, especially with the wronged and the oppressed or those they deem such, and far more to be counted on for obeying these estimable feelings, when once aroused, without regard to selfish interests and consequences, than classes who might be expected to take loftier, wider, and more complex views. It will follow from these admissions that in those grand and simple political issues which every now and then come up before a community for solution, into which morals

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enter more largely than considerations of expediency, and in which the impulses of natural and unperverted men, and usually of aggregated men (that is, of masses), may be trusted for substantial kindliness and justice-in questions where the equitable features lie upon the surface and are written in sunbeams, or where the principle involved is so great and clear that the details which obscure and the collateral consequences which complicate may safely be neglected— in those cases, few and rare, yet whose existence cannot be denied, where (to use the noble and convincing expression of Burke) the heart of youth may be wiser than the head of age'-it may well be granted, I say, that in issues of this character the popular' judgment may be sounder than that of classes far better educated and informed, but whose decisions are much slower to be reached by virtue of the far wider range of the considerations they have to weigh and search for, and whose vision, we must also allow, is apt to be dulled and deflected by inescapable but very grave egotistical bearings.

Further than this I cannot go with Mr. Gladstone. Several of his representations I cannot recognise as more than partially correct; and I entirely demur to the large practical conclusions which he and his supporters draw as being, I consider, but loosely connected with their premisses. Even in the admissions I have made above I can scarcely conceal from myself that the same facts might have been stated in less flattering language, and perhaps less ungrudgingly. I might remark that the masses are apt to be led and governed by their impulses, even when these take the form of vehement passions rather than of generous or kindly emotions. Nor, while recognising to the full the curious sagacity and racy powers of reasoning often very skilfully applied, with which numbers among them are truly credited by Mr. Harrison, and which, as he justly says, constitute in themselves a political education far more properly deserving of the name than that of the idler ranks who may have passed or graduated at Eton or at Oxford, can I recognise, as a general feature of the working classes, that freedom from prejudice and power of doing justice to the arguments of their superiors in rank, nor that facility to welcome instruction and guidance even where they must be conscious of their own ignorance and inaptitude, in which Mr. Gladstone appears to have so large and generous a faith. The Tichborne case, referred to by Lord Arthur, appears to me, in spite of the sarcasm of Mr. F. Harrison, to be singularly significant. The 'Claimant' was upheld, followed, admired, and stuck to with strange enthusiasm by the masses, and not by those of London only. His advocate, with even less rationality, was almost more noisily applauded. Note, too, the analysis, which can scarcely be questioned, of the 'Claimant's' worshippers among the crowd. Half of them gave the measure of their reasoning capacity by retaining their belief and