the Indian official is forced to the Club, where he can relax his mind among his own people, speak his own language, and follow the pursuits that really interest our race, and so, little by little, the people of the country, for whose sake alone he is supposed to be there, appear to him only under the form of cases or numbers—inhuman subjects, to be avoided in polite conversation. The Commissioner, from among his barricades of reports, abstracts, and regulations, gave me the official figures of distress, as far as was ascertained at the end of the third month after the disaster. They showed an estimated area of 460 square miles affected by the flood, with a peasant population of over 300,000; also so many houses swept away, so much loss in cattle and horses, so many deaths from cholera after the flood (nearly 2000), and so many rupees already distributed in relief. From what 1 saw and heard afterwards, I should put the numbers reduced to a skeleton condition at about 5 per cent. of the 300,000 population. That does not sound very much, but if you work it out, it gives 15,000 brown skeletons close to the touch of death by hunger. For myself, I cannot think in thousands. I trust economists and officials to do that for me. But there was one phrase in the official statement that appeared quite comprehensible even to me: it was, “Deaths from starvation, nil.” Nothing could well be more explicit, yet even that simple assertion began to look as elusive as other economics when I went out into the villages and saw the bony corpses and was told the official cause of death is always some innocent and unavoidable sickness like cholera or “bowel complaint,” and that the official mind has a rooted objection to starvation.