The drink question in Madras is much the same as in the rest of India. In a sense, it is worse even than in England, for we see one of the most temperate and frugal populations of the world gradually taking to drink as a new habit.[32] The increase of drink is largely due to education, largely to the example of Europeans and of Indians lately returned from Europe; partly, in Madras at all events, to Christianized Indians who claim the right of casting off all the old restrictions of Indian behaviour. As in England, the Government does not escape its share of blame, owing to the large revenue derived from the drink trade. The Excise or “Abkari” Department sells the licences by auction, the bidding is keen, and it is difficult to prevent the purchaser of a licence from setting up business in the most lucrative position he can find. By a series of resolutions in February, 1890, the Government of India declared its intention of reducing the drink traffic, especially by the restriction of shops. Nevertheless, the traffic has very largely increased, and if the number of shops has not increased in proportion, they have been opened near market places, bathing ghats, schools, hospitals, temples, factories, and other places of common resort, where, as Sir Frederic Lely has said, they serve as “veritable traps to catch the weak, the thirsty, and the tired.” It is difficult to define how far the most paternal of Governments is responsible for the excesses of its children, to whom it refuses the common rights of grown men. The evils of the drink traffic in India were not to be compared with the evils I had seen in West and Central Africa, nor were they so pronounced in Madras as in Calcutta. But the growth of the drinking habit—mainly European in origin—must be added to the other more prominent causes of unrest, even among a population so peaceful and backward as Madras is considered to be in comparison with Poona. Hatred of drink as something equally deadly and foreign was one of the causes why the Swadeshi movement, starting from Eastern Bengal, had spread in less than two years throughout the whole country. Of that movement I had already seen many evidences. In Bombay I had seen the Indian cotton-mills working against time to meet the demand for _saris_ and _dhotis_ (women’s and men’s cloths) free from the taint of foreign profit. And now in Madras I found the Swadeshi movement very strong. “None but Swadeshi goods,” “Buy our Nationalist cottons,” “Try our Bande Mataram cigarettes,” were the most telling advertisements a shop could write up or insert in the native newspapers, which are particularly strong and excellent in Madras. [Illustration: DANCE OF HIGH CASTE GIRLS IN MADRAS. [_Face p. 122._ ]