Before we interfered, the condition of things was totally different. The practical proprietorship of the land was then in the hands of a few princes or feudal lords, who derived from it immense revenues they had no means of spending, except in works of ostentation, which in certain stages of civilization are as necessary for the employment of the masses as for their own glorification. In such a country as India the employment of one-half of the population in agriculture is sufficient to produce food for the whole, while the other half are free for any employment that may be available. We in this country employ our non-agricultural half in manufactures and commerce. The southern Indians had neither, and found no better occupation for the surplus population than in temple-building. Whether this was more profitable or beneficial than hammering iron or spinning cotton is not a question it is necessary to enter on here. It is enough to know the fact, and to mark its consequences. The population of southern India in the 17th and 18th century was probably hardly less than it is now--some thirty millions--and if one-third or one-fourth of such a population were to seek employment in building, the results, if persevered in through centuries, would be something astonishing. A similar state of affairs prevailed apparently in Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs, but with very different results. The Egyptians had great and lofty ideas, and a hankering after immortality, that impressed itself on all their works. The southern Indians had no such aspirations. Their intellectual status is, and always was, mediocre; they had no literature of their own--no history to which they could look back with pride, and their religion was, and is, an impure and degrading fetishism. It is impossible that anything very grand or imposing should come out of such a state of things. What they had to offer to their gods was a tribute of labour, and that was bestowed without stint. To cut a chain of fifty links out of a block of granite and suspend it between two pillars, was with them a triumph of art. To hollow deep cornices out of the hardest basalt, and to leave all the framings, as if of the most delicate woodwork, standing free, was with them a worthy object of ambition, and their sculptures are still inexplicable mysteries, from our ignorance of how it was possible to execute them. All that millions of hands working through centuries could do, has been done, but with hardly any higher motive than to employ labour and to conquer difficulties, so as to astonish by the amount of the first and the cleverness with which the second was overcome--and astonished we are; but without some higher motive true architecture cannot exist. The Dravidians had not even the constructive difficulties to overcome which enabled the mediæval architects to produce such noble fabrics as our cathedrals. The aim of architects in the Middle Ages was to design halls which should at the same time be