beetle and the tropical heat of summer were added to the torments of the time; and the publication of the Domesday Book, showing that 710 individuals owned more than one-fourth of the soil of England and Wales, still further aggravated the uneasiness of a territorial aristocracy, whose margin of income for expenditure on luxuries was daily diminishing. The year closed with the sudden return of the Polar Expedition under Sir George Nares. Its record of achievement was most meagre, and its retreat after enduring only one winter in the ice was felt to be discreditable to the manhood of the British Navy. It was, however, discovered that the disaster was due to a terrible outbreak of scurvy in the crews of the Arctic ships, which was traced to their neglect to use lime-juice. The reputation of the explorers for pluck and endurance was thus redeemed at the expense of their intelligence. The daily papers were filled with glowing accounts of the proclamation of the Queen as Empress of India (Kaiser-i-Hind) at Delhi, in the presence of the Viceroy and the great feudatories of the Empire on the 1st of January, 1877. The ceremony was accompanied by salvoes of artillery. A banner and a medal were given to the Princes to commemorate the event, and five of the most powerful magnates, Holkar, Scindiah, the Maharajah of Cashmere, the Maharajah of Travancore, and the Maharanee of Oodeypore, were granted rank, typified by salutes of twenty-one guns, equivalent to that of the Nizam. But as the viceregal salute was raised to thirty-one guns, Holkar and Scindiah, whose claim was to hold higher status than the Viceroy in their own dominions, and equal rank with him elsewhere, went away discontented. The scenic display was a little tawdry and theatrical, and grizzled Anglo-Indians, who had been accustomed to see austere statesmen or stern soldiers on the viceregal throne, were perplexed to find the Empress represented by a Viceroy who appeared to enjoy keenly the Orientalism of the function, and saw no absurdity in representing the majesty of Empire from the back of an elephant, which had been painted white for the occasion. Yet the ceremony was not without a deep meaning. It represented the final triumph of the new system which was introduced into India by Canning, the system by which, instead of ruling India by a paternal bureaucracy, whose aim was to sweep away all magnates who stood between it and the people, the hereditary rights of the native Princes were recognised, and they themselves admitted as corner-stones in the fabric of Empire of which the Kaiser-i-Hind was now proclaimed the apex and crown. It was, therefore, not without significance that the only class unrepresented at the Coronation was the Indian people. Yet one occasionally heard of the Indian people. A quarter of a million of them had been drowned by a cyclone in Bengal when the debates on the Imperial title were going on in London. Eight millions of them were in