"I do not say that we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do that would be to discard the lights of current experience, to reject all progress, all improvement. What I do say is that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of the fathers in any case, we should do so on evidence so conclusive that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand." I firmly believe that we shall be able to develop for our new colonies an administrative branch sufficiently strong for the successful conduct of their affairs and yet preserve all the essentials of republican government. It may be conceded that the viceregal office, with its regal functions and authority, is essential to British rule in India. Yet, properly considered, England is as truly a democracy as the United States. Indeed, there is both education and inspiration for us in the study of the British rule in India. Not by any means that it is perfect--what human institution is perfect? Man is selfish, thoughtless, cruel. The opium traffic, both in India and China, and the introduction of the whiskey "peg" among a "heathen" race, which, with all its faults, preserved for so many centuries the virtue of temperance--these are blots--big, dark, indelible blots--on the good name of England. Nor is it wholly without reason that the complaint is so often made that legislation for India is too often inspired by the desires of Birmingham and Manchester, rather than by the needs of Hindustan. But there are spots on the sun of a splendid performance. There are seven thousand miles of "black water" between the British Isles and Hindustan. The population of the former is thirty-five millions; of the latter, two hundred and fifty millions--one-fifth of the human race. Yet this vast peninsular is held in absolute subjection by the people of those "tight little isles" so far away. In the whole civil and military establishment of British India there are but one hundred thousand whites, as against nearly twice that number of natives. How small a numerical force to rule those teeming millions! And yet, year by year the British element grows smaller and the native element larger and more potent in the government of India. "The English," says Mr. G. W. Steevens in a recent letter to the London _Mail_, "are still the dominant race, but the real ruler of India is the Babu." If the natives were a peaceful, intelligent, or even a homogeneous race, the story would still read like a fairy tale. Far from it. Three-fourths of the number are Hindus of many races, sects and schools, but there are sixty million Mohammedans (more than the total population of the Sultan's domain), besides Sikhs, Janis, Parsees, etc.,--a score or more races of more or less turbulent savages, many of them ready at a moment's notice to cut the throat of any white man, if they only dared.