The Empire of India, with its population of more than three hundred millions, is held by an army which, compared with the hosts of European nations, is a small one. Great Britain has never had in India much more than seventy thousand British troops, not one man to four thousand of the population--a conclusive proof, if any were needed, of the fact that British rule in India is based rather on the goodwill of the Indians than on force. No doubt in the last resort the white soldier is the mainstay of the Government against sedition and revolt; but if sedition and revolt were ever more than partial they would need a much larger garrison to suppress them. Three hundred millions of people would not be indefinitely “kept down” by an army of seventy thousand foreigners, however brave and well disciplined. The truth is that the British supremacy in India, though it has at times involved hard fighting, was founded upon the consent and active co-operation of the Indian races, and is maintained by the same means. Not only is the number of British troops in India comparatively small, but the British Government has not feared to raise and keep up alongside of them an army of Indian regular troops twice as strong, and to arm and make efficient for war other bodies of men drawn from the population, notably some fine contingents of soldiery in the Feudatory chiefships. Altogether it may perhaps be roughly computed that at the outbreak of the War in 1914 the Crown had at its disposal in India, counting local volunteers, perhaps a hundred thousand armed white men and two hundred thousand Indians. This force had to maintain internal order throughout a country as large as all Europe excluding Russia, and to defend the frontiers against any aggression from without. It was regarded, and organised, not as two armies sundered by the colour-line and mutually suspicious of one another, but as one army in which the white regiments and Indian regiments served side by side, as they had served for many generations in many wars, mutually trusting one another and fighting as comrades against any enemy who might threaten the interests of the Indian Empire.