[Sidenote: 25. Jute Mills, Howrah.] [Sidenote: 26. A Workshop in Iron Foundry at Howrah.] [Sidenote: 27. The same, Plate Girders.] [Sidenote: 28. Workpeople bathing at Howrah.] Now we cross to Howrah, to the great jute mills, where the jute fibre grown up country is spun and woven in competition with the jute manufacture of Dundee. In these mills you will find that the machinery bears the names of Dundee and Leeds makers, for the industry is relatively new in India, and has not yet reached the stage of manufacturing its own machinery. Next we pass into the engineering works of Messrs. Burn and Co., where some five thousand natives and some sixty Europeans are employed in the steel industry. Here are plate girders made in these works for railway bridge building, and here in this same industrial town of Howrah are people bathing after work in the jute mills. Let us recount the essence of what we have seen—the Hooghly channel from the ocean, bearing inward the European ships; the Shrine of the Goddess Kali; the Fort which protected the factory of the East India Company; the Monument of the Black Hole; Government House and the Secretariat, whence the vast empire is ruled; the Cathedral and the Racecourse of the white rulers; the Courts of Justice, which, more than any military power, betoken the essence of British rule in India; the Native City with its narrow ways and crowded life drawn from the surrounding agricultural plain; the Howrah Bridge with the steel and jute mills beyond, which imply a vast incoming change in the economic life of this eastern land; and the Botanic Gardens with their wealth of vegetation typifying the ultimate resources of India—the tropical sunshine and the torrential rains. [Sidenote: Repeat Map No. 1.] Now let us run northward by the East Bengal Railway for some three hundred miles to Darjeeling, the hill station of Calcutta, as Ootacamund is the hill station of Madras. We traverse the dead level of the plain with its thickly set villages and tropical vegetation. There are some seven hundred and fifty thousand villages in India, and these village communities are the real India, for only about ten per cent. of the total population is contained in the cities. Yet Bengal in its present limits, which exclude Eastern Bengal, has a population of more than fifty millions, on an area slightly smaller than that of the United Kingdom. Now the total population of the United Kingdom is only some forty-four millions, and of these forty-four millions fully one-third inhabit some forty large cities. Britain is therefore mainly industrial, whereas India is mainly agricultural, nine-tenths of all the people in India being supported by occupations connected with agriculture. From such statistics some idea may be gained of the density of the agricultural population of Bengal, a Province with one great city only, as greatness of cities is measured in our British Islands.