if necessary instantly march in and account for all the Viceroy's troops. Exactly a similar state of things arose on a smaller scale with reference to various earls in England who kept armies; and at last there was hardly a single petty earl maintained troops but that the Lunar commander-in-chief insisted on setting up a military station on Lunar territory just at the front door of his earldom, to keep him in check.

The Lunar government became thus saddled with the expense of an enormous army; and in addition the pay given to Lunar civil officers was so high as to make the expense of the administration excessive. Nevertheless for many years, owing to the wealth of the country and the rigour of the taxation, the government was enabled to be carried on

without getting heavily into debt. But within the Lunar territory the system of taxation entirely destroyed the English upper classes: the nation appeared sinking into one dead level of agricultural labourers and petty traders: there began to be a great outcry of want of capital in a country where before the Lunars came no such want had ever been heard of; and though population increased, railways in many cases were closed, because the traffic would no longer pay working expenses. The only prominent Englishmen left were the earls whom the Lunar power maintained, and whose government was marked solely by rapacity and luxurious extravagance.

During this period from time to time an earl would come forward with documents to claim the customs and excise of some district; and the Lunars, though so rigorous in their taxation, showed great willingness to admit all claims of the kind.

They appeared to have a pride in exerting their resistless power to make even their puppets formidable and great; and they even feigned to believe that the English nation looked with pleasure

on gifts of customs and excise to these claimants, and regarded such gifts as a graceful tribute to a national feeling of patriotism. No representations could move the Lunars in these pensions and gifts of excise; and, what was worse, when the poor English did succeed in raising a stir about a contemplated gift of this kind, the question was always referred for final settlement to the great senate in the Moon. This senate somehow, owing to the distance, could never see the English people, but only the earls: and at last claimants for earldoms sometimes undertook the transit to the Moon to push their claims personally with the senate; and the senators seemed yet more pleasantly tickled by the adulation of vassal earls than the Lunar officials on earth, and could hardly refuse them anything.

At the same time, though the Lunars were so immeasurably in advance of their Mundane subjects in the arts and sciences, their administration of the country was only a partial success. There was no sympathy between the two races, and the Lunars held that everything which succeeded in the Moon ought to be forced on the Mundanes. In social matters extraordinary examples of this radical divergence of the two races were witnessed. The Lunars brought soon their own ladies to share and soften their earthly exile. But to the horror of the English these demi-goddesses arrived without any clothes on, nor, though they complained bitterly of the cold of Britain, would they consent to wear a thread. On this subject the Lunars pressed the adoption of their own views on the Mundanes with great zeal. They argued, 'Your ladies are gifted by Providence with great beauty of form, and were intended to ornament the face of the earth and to gladden the heart of man. You disfigure and cover up these beauties with petticoats and stays in a most unnatural way, and

deprive yourselves of half the innocent pleasure to be derived from their company. The question has nothing to do with female modesty, for you will observe our ladies are models to yours: indeed on your own wretched earth, while many of your completely covered up women behave very wrongly, there are other earthly inhabitants whom you regard as little better than savages who adopt our plan, and whose women are at least as well behaved as yours.' To all this the Mundanes, whose spirit was quite broken, would only reply, You Lunars are far superior to us: we hope to grow by degrees to be your equals; but we cannot overcome all our prejudices at once. For many hundreds of years our ladies have been accustomed to be dressed, and we cannot give up the custom all at once.' The Lunars retorted, 'This practice of covering up your ladies is not really a national practice, for there is ample proof that before you were conquered by the Romans you followed the natural custom.' And the Lunars cited the modern English custom as a striking illustration of a favourite Lunar theory, viz. that the Mundanes were an over-civilised, decayed race, degraded from their pristine purity. So earnest were the Lunars in their zeal to convert the Mundanes on this social and moral question that they were anxious to have the English girls educated in schools conducted on Lunar principles, and Lunar philanthropists came all the way from the Moon to press these girls' schools on the Mundanes, and to teach in them. This put many Mundanes in great difficulty. Every avenue to the pursuits of ambition was now closed against all English except such as adopted Lunar education and professed Lunar principles; and these distinguished and prominent employés of the Lunar Government, while proclaiming the most frantic zeal in behalf of Lunarised girls' schools, yet would not send their

own girls to such schools, at least after they ceased to be infants. The position of these Lunarised Englishmen was indeed very pitiful: their self-respect was destroyed, and complete subserviency to their masters became their most prominent characteristic.

The Lunar Government next, in pursuit of their theory that everything Lunar ought to be introduced below, started an extraordinary Department called the Public Works Department. The Lunar Government, by analogy from the Moon, undertook all kinds of duties which no native English Government had ever thought it necessary to undertake; but in this grand Department they followed no Lunar example-it was invented specially because the Government wished to undertake the drilling of the Mundanes in Lunar Arts and Sciences. This Department was designed to execute all works of every description according to Lunar models. These were found very expensive to carry out on earth, and very few of them were found to give a profitable return. England being now short of capital, the capital for many of these great public works was advanced from the Moon; none of it was given, it was advanced on loan, and the English nation was soon paying several millions sterling per annum to the Lunar capitalists. But many of the Lunar political economists declared it made no difference whether a public debt was owed in the country or out of it.

However, this vast unremunerative Department brought the financial affairs of the Lunar Government to a crisis. England was rich and industrious; half the national revenue had been diverted into private hands; a double army was kept, and England yet could pay; but the addition of the Public Works expenditure proved the straw that broke the camel's back, and the Lunar Government found a serious deficit in their exchequer.

The Lunar Senate discussed this difficulty, and the orators mainly took two views, of which it was difficult to say which astonished the Mundanes most.

One party said the deficit was not owing to the income being less than the expenditure, but was entirely due to the bad adding up performed by the Finance Minister, and that the deficit was his fault, and not that of the Government who spent the money.

Another party held there was no real deficit, because the Public Works expenditure ought to be charged against capital. This party proposed that the Moon should advance on loan whatever the Public Works Department chose to spend, for, as it was to be spent on Lunar principles, the expenditure was sure to prove remunerative in the end.

The Governor-General in England, however, did not see so clearly that all the expenditure of the Public Works Department could be assumed to be remunerative: he saw, moreover, that an indefinite increase in the capital advanced from the Moon must ultimately strangle the country. But as the Lunar Senate was determined, on the one hand, on the maintenance and extension of earldoms, and on generously allowing earls to keep private armies for their amusement or for worse purposes; and as the Lunar Senate was determined, on the other hand, to extend to the utmost Public Works on Lunar principles, the Governor-General on Earth had but one resource, viz. to increase to the utmost the new taxes.

I have pushed this little history to tediousness, perhaps, because I think that some hypothetical fancy of the kind is almost the only device that will enable the European to put himself at all in the position of the Hindu. The hypothesis about the costume of the Lunar ladies, violent as it may appear, is, I believe, hardly violent enough to enable the Eng

lishman to realise Hindu feeling regarding our social arrangements.

In the feudal times the whole revenue of the State, with the persons of its subjects, was supposed to be the private property of the monarch, and as completely at his disposal as the private income of an individual. This view of the Divine Right of Kings was in England replaced by the modern view, which has ultimately reached the length of regarding the monarch as the First Public Servant of the State, drawing a fixed salary (the Civil List), and, like other servants, only to be maintained in his post so long as he earns his pay. This is not the view in Liberal England only, but it will be recollected that, after the disasters of the Seven Weeks' War in bureaucratic Austria, the Emperor himself voluntarily carried out extensive reductions in the Civil List. This distinction of a Civil List from the State Revenue constitutes the difference between a tyranny and a constitutional monarchy.

In the Hindu period in India it does not appear that any setting apart of a Civil List existed; but public opinion operated on the monarch with great force to cause him to spend a large portion of his revenues on public works (tanks and irrigation works which we can hardly rival with our Ganges Canal) and in 'feeding Brahmins.' This feeding of Brahmins was performed more from principle than from superstition, and may fairly be regarded as public grants to science, education, and learning.

It is not necessary to enquire much into the Mahometan period. The Mussulmans were very barbarous foreign conquerors: in their treatment of their Hindu subjects they had hardly any conscience, and no Hindu who knows anything about the matter would wish to see the English institute any Governments on the Mahometan model.

India practically lay at the feet. of the English at the close of the

Mahratta and Pindarree wars. The Marquis Wellesley saw clearly that in order to carry out our duty to the people of India, if we attempted to govern them at all, we required the revenues of the country. Unfortunately, the English Home Government had an idea that generosity to the conquered meant generosity to conquered princes, and compelled the Marquis Wellesley, sorely against his judgment, to establish on a large scale the institution of subsidiary princes, which has since been so frequently imitated with less excuse. In find ing individuals to play the part of subsidiary princes, a member of some governing family was selected if possible-in general, however, a prince who according to no possible interpretation of the laws of succession among kings had any pretence to a crown; and in some cases (notably in the recent Kashmir case), in default of any native candidate, a subsidiary prince was set up who was as much a foreigner as the King of Greece or the Emperor Maximilian.

These subsidiary princes were put in possession of large territories, and in a totally different position from any preceding Hindu or Mussulman princes. Provided they were faithful to the English (and especially provided they did not intrigue with the French), they were guaranteed absolutely by treaty in their principalities by the irresistible power of the British Government. They sometimes had further to pay a subsidy to the Imperial Treasury, or to maintain a subsidiary force officered by English officers; but subject to these conditions they were guaranteed perfect freedom in their own territory. They were set up as tyrants instead of as constitutional responsible monarchs. The revenues of their territories went directly to their own pockets. And it may be said almost without exception that these princes, besides maintaining a private army, have

applied the whole balance of their State revenues to their own private luxuries and extravagance.

Now two great evils arise under this system which never arose in the worst Mussulman times. First, we have deprived the people of the ultimate right of peoples, viz. the right of rebellion. The might of the English is so irresistible, that no attempt by rebellion to upset one of these subsidiary princes can attempted, however gross their oppression or unpopularity. They have consequently reigned with a recklessness, and yet with a permanence, unknown in former times, when a prince was always kept in check by the reflection that if he goaded his subjects beyond a certain point a rival to the throne might appear. In one or two cases the misgovernment of the subsidiary prince has reached such a horrible flagrancy (as in the case of Oude) that the English Government has been compelled to interfere. But in general a subsidiary prince is allowed to collect revenue with troops, or to set up a Government monopoly of all the rice in the country, and thus squeeze the last rupee from the people, without action on the part of the Imperial Government. What that Government feels is of course that if they interfere at all they must interfere everywhere for once and aye. No native prince carries on his administration according to our ideas of duty; and if we are to interfere when we disapprove, the very shadow of his independence is gone, and the whole theory of subsidiary government upset. The line is one that cannot be drawn, and the Imperial Government will not pretend to draw it.

The second great novel evil that has arisen under our subsidiary system is that the spendthrift native prince is able to borrow on the security of the State revenues, and almost invariably does borrow, and applies the money to the privy purse.

Under former misgovernment, the misgoverning prince's head sat so lightly on his shoulders that he could not anticipate the State revenue by a rupee; but when revenue is guaranteed by the British Government, not only native but English capitalists have been found ready to advance money, and on a large scale. Almost the chief trouble that the English Government has had with these subsidiary princes has been to relieve them from the state of abject indebtedness into which they fall; and of course the knowledge that the Imperial Government has interfered in this way, and may interfere again, induces the capitalist to proffer increased facilities of acquiring ready money to the subsidiary prince.

But by far the most extraordinary feature with regard to these subsidiary princes is that they are permitted to keep hordes of turbulent private troops besides the subsidiary force. The existence of such armies as Scindia and the Nizam keep is the excuse (and one not altogether without solidity) for keeping our still enormous native army. The private armies of Scindia and the Nizam are formidable from their numbers, and respectably disciplined and accoutred; though doubtless, like all other Eastern armies, they would be as sheep before wolves when a single British brigade with the bayonet could get near enough to see the whites of their eyes. Now, why do the native princes keep these armies ? First, to continue the sham of being independent princes. Secondly, to collect revenue and tyrannise at pleasure over their subjects. Thirdly, to diminish the chance of their being swallowed by the English, which they all feel must come some day they hope to delay the day by putting themselves in such a position that it may give the English some little trouble to do it.

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These princes (and many others) do not rule foreign or border States;

their territories are surrounded by British ground on every side : ought any one of these reasons for keeping private armies to be listened to by the English Government for one moment? Take the two best modern analogous cases of subsidiary princes. When Saxony was made subsidiary to Prussia, did not Prussia insist that instead of a private army Saxony should be garrisoned by a division of the regular Prussian army? And did not all Europe, though sympathising with the King of Saxony, see that the Prussian demand was really necessitated by the circumstances of the case? In the still stronger case when the Sultan objected to the Viceroy of Egypt increasing his armaments, did not 'the Powers' admit the reasonableness of the Sultan's view? This is an extreme case, considering the slenderness of the thread that binds Egypt to the Turkish Empire.

All this is self-evident; and our Indian statesmen see it clearly enough; the difficulty they feel lies in the treaties which we entered into with our subsidiary princes when we set them up. These treaties generally guarantee the subsidiary prince in undisturbed, free, and uncontrolled liberty within his own territory, provided he keeps the conditions of the treaty, payment of subsidy, &c. All Indian statesmen feel keenly the moral duty of exhibiting the strictest good faith in our dealings with the natives at almost any sacrifice; though in passing it may be said that a great deal of this sacrifice is in vain; for the natives do not give us credit for any sentiment but cowardice when they see give up an advantage; and, moreover, very often when we act, according to our own notions, with the most scrupulous uprightness, our conduct appears according to the native standard as dishonest as any of their own proceedings.

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