All who are interested in the future of England and India should read this volume, which, although written as far back as Lord Ripon's viceroyalty, applies in all its lessons and all its warnings with ten times greater force to the India of to-day, which, with the three-fold curse upon it of famine, of drought, and of plague, finds the British Government too engrossed in its aggressive and criminal war in South Africa to come to the relief of its Indian Empire, where tens of thousands of human lives, and millions of animals, are wasting in death and in despair. VII JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN Several years ago, at the moment when Mr Chamberlain, having abandoned the Liberal Party, was adored by the party which calls itself Conservative, I looked at him one evening after a dinner in a well-known house in Belgrave Square. He was standing, surrounded by the loveliest and most fashionable women of society, who were offering him a homage which must have been delightful to him. It was an interesting, if rather comical, spectacle, and I imagine that Chamberlain, though he gave no sign of doing so, enjoyed it extremely, and laughed at it in his sleeve. His physiognomy indicates his character; it has no distinction, but it is full of energy, intelligence, and resolution; it is the physiognomy of a tradesman, not of a statesman, of a person extremely keen and acute, obstinate and cruel, but not by any means intellectual. The eternal eyeglass serves to hide such expression as his features might have, and the nose, short and _rétroussé_, makes plebeian lineaments which might without this defect be sufficiently regular. In these later times he has aged more than his years perhaps justify, and it is said that he suffers from neuralgia and gout. He is always well dressed; 'too well' an ex-Viceroy murmured to me that evening; and he is never seen, as everyone knows, without an orchid in his button-hole; a flower always culled in one of those famous orchid-houses at Highbury, which, before his conversion, the Tory ladies longed so passionately to burn down, in days when he was considered odious, accursed, almost an Antichrist!--days not so very distant as the life of a nation counts.