On leaving even small and beautiful cities like Poona you pass through a zone where the inhabitants enjoy the health and suffer from the scrappiness of suburbs. Here they live partly by gardening, partly by burning lime or working in the town, and their houses have a touch of urban refinement. The ceilings and the tops of the walls, for instance, are hung with those garish pictures of religious subjects—the adventures of Krishna, and other scenes—which would provide so suitable a market for German art. But the suburbs are short, within a few miles you enter the heart of the country, and in his primeval village are brought face to face with the ryot—the cultivator of the soil, the basis of the Indian Empire, the one man for whom, or at least by means of whom, all the rest of the intricate machinery exists, from the splendours of Simla down to the office of the “Remembrancer of Legal Affairs,” and the “Finger-print Bureau,” in Poona’s residential quarter, or to Lord Kitchener’s reviews in the Poona cantonment. In my various journeys within a circle of twenty miles round the city, I found the ryot much what I had expected—gentle-mannered, patient, hardy, and incredibly thin, living with his family in a clean but dusty hut, furnished with little beyond a few brass pots and dishes. All day he was working in his field, and he gathered for converse at evening—“cow-dust time,” as they call it—on the steps of the village temple, in which a vague red image represents the idea of helpful strength—something like Hercules or the Archangel Michael; for it is the same Maruta who helped Rama on his wandering search for the beloved Sita. I have never heard even the most frigid official speak evil of the ryot. As the best patronizers in the world, we find in the ryot a most suitable object for our characteristic capacity. Hard-working, sober, and reverential beyond the dreams of country parsons, he is exactly the sort of being to whom we enjoy extending the kindly and protective sympathy due from a squire to his villagers. Just as in Natal or Nigeria every one is ready to commend the untutored savage and pat his curly head provided he remains savage, so in India even the Anglo-Indian will admit a distant affection for the poor dear ryot, and regrets the good old times when hardly an Indian of them all made pretence to further education or equality. But education and equality are the two things that undermine our accustomed pedestal, and the thought of a time when we might no longer be required to exercise our national function of patronage fills us with dismay.