The administration reports of some of these gentlemen may vie with those of our best English officers; and the names of Sir Dinkar Rao, Sir Madava Rao, Sir Salar Jung, and others, give full indication that among the natives of India may be found men eminently qualified for the task of government. Wittingly or unwittingly, English officials in India are preparing materials which some day or other will form the groundwork for a native empire or empires. I was thrown closely into contact with the Civil Service whilst I was in India, for I employed all my vacations in travelling through the country, mostly at a foot's pace. Everywhere I went I found a cultivated English gentleman exerting himself to the best of his ability to extend the blessings of civilisation--justice, education, the development of all local resources. I firmly believe that no government in the world has ever possessed a body of administrators to vie with the Civil Service of India. Nor do I speak only of the service as it existed under the East India Company, for, from all that I have heard and observed, competition supplies quite as good servants of the State as did in earlier days the patronage of the Court of Directors. The truth is, that the excellence of the result has been attributable in nowise to the mode of selection, but to the local circumstances which call forth in either case, in the young Englishman of decent education and of the moral tone belonging to the middle classes of this country, the best qualities of his nature. But in these energetic, high-principled, and able administrators we have a danger to good government which it is necessary to point out. Every Englishman in office in India has great power, and every Englishman, as the late Lord Lytton once observed to me, is in heart a reformer. His native energy will not enable him to sit still with his hands before him. He must be improving something. The tendency of the English official in India is to over-reform, to introduce what he may deem improvements, but which turn out egregious failures, and this, be it observed, amongst the most conservative people of the world. Some of the most carefully devised schemes for native improvement have culminated in native deterioration. A remarkable illustration of this position is afforded by the late inquiry into the causes of the riots among the cultivators of the Deccan. It has been one of the pretensions of British administration that they have instituted for the first time in India pure and impartial courts of justice. And the boast is well founded. In the Presidency of Bombay also the Government has substituted long leases of thirty years on what may be called Crown Lands for the yearly holdings formerly in vogue. They have also greatly moderated the assessment. The result has been that land in the Bombay Presidency from being unsaleable has acquired a value of from ten to twenty years' purchase. But the effect