South of Bombay, on the coast, is the little Portuguese colony of Goa, the oldest European settlement in India. You will be surprised to know that there are four or five of these colonies belonging to other European governments within the limits of British India, entirely independent of the viceroy and the authority of Edward VII. The French have two towns of limited area in Bengal, one of them only an hour's ride from Calcutta. They are entirely outside of the British jurisdiction and under the authority of the French Republic, which has always been respected. The Dutch have two colonies in India also, and Goa, the most important of all, is subject to Portugal. The territory is sixty-two miles long by forty miles wide, and has a population of 446,982. The inhabitants are nearly all Roman Catholics, and the archbishop of Goa is primate of the East, having jurisdiction over all Roman Catholics between Cairo and Hong-Kong. More than half of the population are converted Hindus, descendants of the original occupants of the place, who were overcome by the Duke of Albuquerque in 1510, and after seventy or eighty years of fighting were converted by the celebrated and saintly Jesuit missionary, St. Francis Xavier. He lived and preached and died in Goa, and was buried in the Church of the Good Jesus, which was erected by him during the golden age of Portugal--for at one time that little kingdom exercised a military, political, ecclesiastical and commercial influence throughout the world quite as great, comparatively speaking, as that of Great Britain to-day. Goa was then the most important city in the East, for its wealth and commerce rivaled that of Genoa or Venice. It was as large as Paris or London, and the viceroy lived in a palace as fine as that occupied by the king. But very little evidence of its former magnificence remains. Its grandeur was soon exhausted when the Dutch and the East India Company came into competition with the Portuguese. The Latin race has never been tenacious either in politics or commerce. Like the Spaniards, the Portuguese have no staying power, and after a struggle lasting seventy years, all of the wide Portuguese possessions in the East fell into the hands of the Dutch and the British, and nothing is now left but Goa, with its ruins and reminiscences and the beautiful shrine of marble and jasper, which the Grand Duke of Tuscany erected in honor of the first great missionary to the East. IV THE EMPIRE OF INDIA