every year. With the growth of irrigation famine is beaten within smaller and smaller area, and when after long successive drought it rears its head, the extension of railways enables the Government to grapple with it. For irrigation works and for the fostering of trade the natives of India have directly to thank the British Government. That Government is in the strictest and best sense a paternal government, watching over the needs and the welfare of the people with keen, wise eyes, and doing for them what they are either too indolent or too ignorant to do for themselves.

It is undeniable that in the earlier history of British rule in India there are many pages which cannot be looked upon without feelings of shame and indignation. For the last thirty years, since the Viceroyalty of Lord Dalhousie, the whole energies and the entire spirit of the English Government have been devoted to improving the condition of the natives and of the country. "Governments exist for the good of the governed," was Lord Dalhousie's rule, a little startling, not to say blasphemous, to Anglo-Indians of the old school, but which has on the whole been adopted as the axiom off successive viceroys. The result of British rule upon the condition of the natives is set

forth in the incontrovertible language of facts. Wherever a state has been annexed it has grown in numbers, prosperity, and social improvement.

We hear from time to time much passionate sympathy expressed for the "down-trodden native of India," crushed under the weight of taxation. As a matter of fact the rate of gross taxation paid by the natives during the ten years ending 1879 was 3s. 8d. a head. In 1880 the foray into Afghanistan had increased this to 4s. a head. But the British taxpayer, in addition to local and municipal rates, pays imperial taxes at the rate of £2 a head. In the penultimate days of the Mogul Empire, of which England was in due course the successor, eighty millions sterling were exacted in the way of taxation as against thirty-five millions now drawn, whilst Aurungzebe ruled over a smaller area and a considerably less population than own the sway of Victoria. The Famine Commissioners, in their report published in 1880, state that throughout British India the landed classes pay revenue at the maximum rate of 5s. 6d. a head, the trading classes pay 3s. 3d., the artizans 2s., and the agricultural labourers 1s. 8d.

"Any native of India," the Commissioners add, "who does not trade or own land, and

who chooses to drink no spirituous liquor and to use no English cloth or iron" (conditions easily fulfilled by a native), "need pay in taxation only about 7d. a year on account of the salt he consumes." On a family of three persons the charge amounts to 1s. 9d.; which, it is true, is in the lowest strata equal to four days' wages of a labouring man and his wife. But what labouring man is there in England who would not gladly compound with the State by yielding four days', or even seven days', labour as payment in full for all taxation, direct, indirect, local, and municipal?

The truth is that India has been made by England, after being delivered by her strong arm from successive floods of cruel conquest and rapine, Afghan, Mussulman, Persian, Tartar, or Maharatta. The natives who tilled the soil had no chance till the English came, and it must be admitted not much immediately after, though it was the rajahs, fat with the spoils of each other's palaces and temples, that Clive and Warren Hastings chiefly bled. All that is changed now, and the good of the governed is the object of the solicitude of the governors, not without some evidences of fretful irritation on the part of the descendants and successors of the old colonists. India has now fairly entered upon the path of pros

perity, is able, and I believe willing, to pay the moderate price levied for the charges of good government, asking only to be delivered from the ruinous fines incurred by restless foreign policy in Downing Street, and the clash of party warfare at Westminster.

CHAPTER XXIII.

A BRITISH OUTPOST.

REGARDED as a harbour, Aden is one of the finest sites in the world. As a home for man it is among the most desolate. It yields neither fruit nor vegetables, nor grows flowers, nor scarcely any grass or green thing. Its hills yield no fresh streams, nor is water to be had by digging wells. Condensed water is the sole resource of the colonists, and beef alternating with mutton their daily fare, except when friendly ships bring rare presents of fowl or game. The harbour and the European settlement are built on a narrow strip of sandy, gravelly land, lying at the feet of hard bare brown rocks. Somebody must, from time to time, sojourn here, for there are two hotels whose high-sounding names contrast with the desolation of the scene. Nothing less than the "Hotel de l'Univers," unless it be the "Hotel de l'Europe," will do for Aden. It is