The climate, at least during the hot season, is almost death to white men, and certain death to white children. The English accordingly send their children "home" to be educated and spend their tender years. This means not only the anguish of separation but also a heavy expense, which, in the present depreciated state of the rupee, is hardly borne. The native princes, great and small, ignorant for the most part, idle, bigoted, superstitious, and naturally jealous of white rule, do what they can to block the wheels of progress and embarrass the government. Herein they have the eager co-operation of the priests, who are jealous of foreign influence and often able to inflame the people into open resistance to the most wholesome orders and regulations. Popular ignorance and superstition lend themselves readily to such mischievous designs. A mutiny may be started by a government order to build a sewer or to vaccinate the inhabitants of a village. It is easy for the priests to persuade their docile charges that vaccination is witchcraft and an instrument of the devil. The policy of the government is tender of native sensibilities, and humors religious and caste distinctions; but the smallest accident or mistake may precipitate a riot or undo the good work of years. Those who have read Kipling's stories of native Indian life have a picture more than photographically accurate of "paternal government" under difficulties. Nor is it inconsistent with perverse human nature that much of the government's trouble comes from the well-meant but pernicious interference of globe-trotting M. P.'s and parochial statesmen who have solved the problem from afar and come out to India to fan the discontent of pampered natives or aggravate the perplexities of overworked civil servants, held up to execration as the "overpaid and aristocratic favorites of a wasteful government." England, as well as America, has her anti-imperialists. Yet, in spite of these and a thousand other difficulties and discouragements, a great and really good work goes on, making steadily for the moral and material uplift of the unthankful blacks. Popular education struggles forward against the bigotry and deep-rooted folly of ages. Public roads and other improvements lessen the tremendous distances between field and market, and so lessen the chances of famine. Rivers are deflected and canals built to irrigate waste places and make the desert blossom and bear fruit. Folly and extravagance are restrained in high places; system is established in place of chaos, and the hereditary pauper is taught the blessings of self-support. In something like a century much has been done to reform abuses which, like the pedigree of a rajah, run back through many centuries. True, much still remains to be done; but take it by and with, good and bad together, I know of no other chapter in history so creditable to the race as this.