If the administration of India in its present state must, in its chief offices, remain in the hands of Europeans, it must be expensive. The great officers of state, considering the dignity they have to maintain and the establishments they have to keep, must be highly paid. When we think of the qualifications required by those who are charged with the ordinary administration, the great expense to which they are put, the years they spend in laborious work in an exhausting climate, and their unfitness as a rule for work in England on their retirement, I do not think their income or pension can be to any large extent safely or justly reduced. The era of nabobs, returning with vast wealth to astonish the English people, has long since passed away. These men had small pay, but great perquisites. The pay has been greatly increased, but the perquisites are gone, and India has benefited vastly by the change. Indian magistrates have much to tell of the litigiousness of the people, their constant attempts to overreach each other, the carefully woven lies which they have daily to unravel, the trust put in bribes to influence decisions, and the deeply ingrained notion in the minds of native officials that they should get more for their services to the public than the bare pay, the _sookha tulub_--_dry wages_--as it is contemptuously called. [Sidenote: THE POVERTY OF THE PEOPLE.] The people of Northern India are mainly agricultural, and they are unquestionably poor. Our very success has in one aspect tended to their impoverishment. With very few exceptions they marry young, and during the many years of peace which have passed over them, with the exception of the short sharp crisis of the Mutiny, the population has greatly increased. Whenever an epidemic breaks out, means are at once employed to check it. There is a vaccination department for the purpose of preventing the ravages of small-pox. Female infanticide, which had prevailed to a frightful extent among certain castes, has been diminished, though not, it is feared, wholly suppressed. It is well known that famines have been sadly destructive of life, but there is evidence that previous to our rule, when there were few roads and little communication between one part of India and another, famines were still more so. Among so vast a population directly dependent on the soil, in a country where rain is so indispensable, and is now and then a failure, we have too much reason to fear famines may yet recur; but such provision is now made against their ravages, that it is hoped the catastrophes of the past will be escaped.