The new spirit in India

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

FOOTNOTES:

[19] The total military expenditure for India, including Marine, Military Works, etc., was £21,586,086 for 1906-7, but this was reduced in the following year to £20,520,500. See “Government of India, Financial Statement, 1908-9,” p. 16.

[20] Of the many books on the Indian Land Revenue, one may consult Mr. Romesh Dutt’s “India in the Victorian Age,” “Famines and Land Assessment,” and “The Economic History of British India”; “Land Revenue Policy,” an official reply to Mr. Dutt’s criticisms, issued by Lord Curzon in 1902; some chapters in Sir Henry Cotton’s “New India”; some pamphlets by Sir William Wedderburn, “The Indian Ryot,” “The Skeleton at the Jubilee Feast,” etc.; “Indian Problems,” by Mr. S. M. Mitra (strongly on the official side); and Mr. Sidney Low’s “Vision of India,” containing in chapter xxiii. an interesting account of the Settlement Officer’s work in camp. Mr. Theodore Morison’s “Industrial Organization of an Indian Province” (1906), is also mainly occupied with the land question in the United Provinces of Agra and Oude.

[21] “Land Revenue Policy” (1902), p. 13.

[22] Quoted by Mr. Vaughan Nash in his chapter on the Land Revenue System: “The Great Famine and its Causes” (1900).

[23] “India in the Victorian Age,” by R. C. Dutt, p. 491 (2nd edition).

[24] “The Great Famine,” pp. 240-2.

[25] Letter from “A Poona Resident” to the Glasgow Herald, December 14, 1907.

[26] “The Great Famine,” p. 62 ff.

[27] See “The Skeleton at the Jubilee Feast,” by Sir William Wedderburn (1897), p. 9.

[28] The whole question of land-ownership and the Settlement is very lucidly discussed in Mr. Theodore Morison’s “Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,” chapter ii. His general conclusion is that the Indian system of land-tenure is something intermediate between complete nationalization and absolute private property. “To the extent of one-half the State is able to appropriate that unearned increment in rental incomes which is due to the development of the country. But, except for this contribution to the public exchequer, the economic position of the landlord is not affected by the land revenue laws. He receives rent for the use of the national and indestructible properties of the soil, and he raises that rent when the growth of population and the development of the country makes it profitable to bring poorer lands under cultivation.” In saying this, Mr. Morison is, however, obviously thinking only of a zemindar or landlord district, such as the United Province, with which his book chiefly deals.

[29] The net profit on Forest Revenue for 1905-6 was £824,748. In the four previous years it had risen by nearly £100,000 a year, but in 1907-8 it dropped to £756,100, chiefly owing to a fall of price in Burma.

CHAPTER V
The Southern City

Madras, the most Oriental of the great Indian cities, is well known to English people as the first foothold of Elizabethan merchants, the fortress of Clive, and the coral strand where little English boys used to convert their patient bearers. But apart from these associations, the mother city of Southern India has a peculiar character of her own. Her reformers talk with confidence of the dry light of reason in Madras. They pride themselves on the logic and unimpassioned judgment of her mind. They point to the neighbouring State of Mysore to show what Southern Indians like themselves can do in the way of political advancement, and to Travancore as the most highly educated part of India—the State where women have most freedom, both to gather knowledge and to enjoy their home or leave it. The whole of South India, but especially the city of Madras itself, they regard as a reserve of intellectual force, always ready to support the new spirit that has appeared in the north and west, and destined ultimately to take the lead in the general movement of reform.

Certainly I noticed signs of a practical intelligence that might be called dry. Hour after hour, on a steaming afternoon, I listened to the Madras members of the municipal corporation arguing in protest against the English members and officials about the position of standpipes, and the adulteration of ghee with oil, and of rice with sand, while the President, in the broadest Scots, kept calling on them to address the chair, or declaring their motion lost. When I was in Madras also, the Decentralization Commission, under Mr. Charles Hobhouse, at that time Under-Secretary for India, began its session, and the educated citizens followed the chaotic windings of its questions and evidence with minute accuracy, all the more eager, perhaps, because Mr. Romesh Dutt, the national authority on Indian economics, was among the Commissioners. It was even more significant that Madras, the devoted home of Hinduism and of Vishnu’s worshippers, should have steadily chosen her leading Mohammedan citizen as her representative upon the Viceroy’s Council. One may call this a sign of practical intelligence and the dry light of reason, because they could not have chosen a better member than Nawab Syed Mohammed, descendant of our old enemy Tippoo Sultan, and their deep sense of religion did not deter them from the choice. Calm, modest, and generally silent but for a few definite words thrown into a discussion, he seemed an ideal member for any Council.

Yet, though the boast of reason’s dry light is justified, the pervading tone of Madras, and probably of all Southern India, is not practical logic, but imaginative religion. One sometimes finds the two things in attractive combination. I had gone out one early morning to visit the god in his beautiful temple at Mailapur, not very far from the widespread “compounds” of park and garden, where the happy English and a few rich Indians reside, two or three miles inland from the sea and the jumbled “Black Town” of crowded natives. There, as I stood by the edge of the temple tank covered with the lotus, I came upon an elderly Hindu reading at the door of his modest home. The verandah was partly arranged as a stable for the sacred cow, partly laid with mats for beggars, wanderers, or religious teachers who might be seeking a shelter for the night. The man had bathed in the tank and washed his only garment of a long cotton cloth, as he did every morning himself, following the cleanly and chivalrous Indian custom. He was a schoolmaster, with a fixed salary of £3 6s. 8d. a month. Upon this he mainly supported his sons and their wives and children, all of whom lived in his house, under the direction of his widowed mother, who arranged which of the married couples should occupy the married quarters in turn, as there was not room to supply married quarters for all. In gratitude for her services, and in reverence for motherhood, “which is the centre of human life,” he told me how every morning members of the family washed the widow’s feet and covered them with flowers, as though they were the feet of a divinity.

The day being a religious holiday—a festival of Shiva, destroyer and healer—he was spending the quiet hours in meditating upon God, and reading a large volume of Professor William James’s “Principles of Psychology.” In religion he was inclined to the Monist view that the spirit of man is identical in essence with the spirit of God, but admitted that he felt no violent enmity towards the Dualists, who maintain a difference in essence. He wore on his forehead the three strong lines of white and vermillion, which represent the footprint of Vishnu, the maintainer of existence, and pronounce the wearer to be a reverential servant to the god’s commands. But, here again, he felt no enmity towards the worshippers of Shiva, who draw three parallel lines in grey or yellow earth across their brows. His true interest lay in the region of philosophy, and as a Monist his conception of the universe hardly differed from Spinozism, unless it be said that he went beyond Spinoza in his belief in a universal Consciousness, the subtle waves of which he could himself universally perceive if only his mind were not too gross an instrument of perception. All through his life he had striven to purify and etherialize that instrument by clean feeding and the practice of concentration. He had never touched flesh or strong drink or tobacco. By practising for an increasing time every day, he had been able to fix his mind on eternal truths with such absorption that the transitory things no longer disturbed his meditation, and he had acquired new and subtle powers, enabling him dimly to perceive a consciousness in the air and so-called inanimate objects. He could sometimes even feel the impalpable workings of Karma—the influence of man’s reputed good or evil deeds working upon his own destiny, and affecting even the infinitesimal atoms of the universe.

A Servant of Vishnu.

[Face p. 106.

He now longed to retire from the world, to lay aside his sacred thread—the triple thread of Brahmans—and devote to contemplation the few years left. But the size of his patriarchal household, and the necessity of making that 16s. 8d. a week restrained him, and, of course, his motives were laudable. Nevertheless, as usually happens, it would have been better for himself and his family if he had flung away his obvious duties and followed the call of his higher thoughts alone. For as I came away after receiving sour milk, and the usual pan leaf enclosing a bit of spice and beetel-nut to chew, one of his sons—an inferior telegraph clerk—stole after me to ask my advice about £2, which he had forwarded to a swindling Trust Company that plays the confidence trick with Congo Bonds and other ludicrous impostures. It was pitiful to think that the £2, now probably greasing the dirty works of Belgian brothels and gambling-hells, might have secured the philosopher nearly three weeks’ leisure from his school-teaching for the contemplation of the Monistic Essence, and but for his sense of family duty his son could not have squandered it.

The End of Man.

Offerings to the Dead.

[Face p. 108.

But among the common multitudes of the city, the dry light of this philosophic spirit is not conspicuous. It has never arisen, and the religious fervour of their existence remains misty, dark, and warm. Relics of far older beliefs mingle with their Hinduism. In one of their burning-grounds I met a little procession carrying milk in brazen bowls to wash the bones of the dead burnt yesterday, and to pour an offering for the spirit’s consolation. Round another grave a group of mourners were seated, offering yellow flowers, and pouring water on the dust that was alive last week. Two of them beat cymbals, and at long intervals a man raised a large white conch-shell to his lips and blew a melancholy note. Why will not the dead listen when they are called? Why will they not give one word of answer to trumpet, prayers, and love? And all the while, one of the mourners, regardless of the world, swayed to and fro chanting the undying truth that man must die, for life is a shadow, and he vanishes; those who stand beside a grave know this truth undying; they know that they too shall vanish like a shade, yet they go back to the city and sin, and sin again, forgetting that they too shall vanish like a shade. So the lamentation went on, the water was poured, the milk was offered, the conch-shell sounded its last vain summons, and the living returned to their life of numbered days. In the middle of Africa I have witnessed a yearning ceremonial exactly the same. It was the same that brought Electra out to Agamemnon’s tomb. It is the same that one may still see on All Saints’ Day, in any primitive region of Europe, and in the cemeteries of Paris herself. For it springs from the common longing of all mankind not to be forgotten, and, if only it were possible, never to forget. The same truth has been beautifully expressed with regard to the Bulgarian villagers of Macedonia by Mr. Brailsford in his book upon that country:—

“The real religion of the Balkans is older and more elemental than Christianity itself; more permanent even than the Byzantine rite. It bridges the intervening centuries and links in pious succession the modern peasant to his heathen ancestor, who wore the same costumes and led the same life in the same fields. It is based on a primitive sorrow before the amazing fact of death, which no mystery of the Resurrection has ever softened. It is neither a rite nor a creed, but only that yearning love of the living for the dead which is deeper than any creed.”[30]

In the service of the living, the fervent religious spirit of the South takes other forms, some of adoration, some only ritualistic. Now and then it turns to practical utility—the hope that religion will bring some temporal good to the worshipper. There is a belief almost universal, I suppose, in our own country and in Europe that religious thoughts, prayers, and observances ensure outward well-being, health, protection, or prosperity of some kind. In the East it is probably not so common, for religion is there elevated to its proper sphere of the inmost soul, where the comforts and external advantages of life disappear into insignificance compared with the glory that is revealed. But, deeply religious as the Hindu mind can be, I found the people in the streets of Madras directing religious ecstasy to the rather trivial object of healing disease, much as though they had been mere Faith-healers or Christian Scientists. The festival of Shiva lasted three or four days, and at any hour of the burning sunlight, one could meet little processions parading through Black Town with some sort of shrine or image, accompanied by pipes and drums, dancing and praying crowds. The sick were caught up from the doors into the pious orgies and with holy revelry danced themselves into a state of ecstatic self-forgetfulness which was unquestionably wholesome. Few diseases, I think, could stand against such treatment, provided only that the patient survived. It might be tried with miraculous results in the streets of our bath-chair watering-places. But if the triumph and proof of religion depended on mere miracles of healing the sick and raising the dead, it would be a pity to waste a minute’s thought upon the subject.

Far more fruitful was the unmixed and disinterested adoration that thronged the temples in the evening. One night I found myself at a beautiful temple in the southern part of the town. It is a Vishnu temple: here is his tank, here his chariot. But the people there were celebrating the festival of Shiva all the same, and among the deep orange columns of the external portico, dim figures in white or Indian red moved silently about, hardly revealed in the purple night by rare lanterns and tiny lamps. Being accompanied by a Brahman who was guardian of the temple, I was admitted through brazen doors into a vast courtyard leading up to the inner shrine on which no alien may look. Here the worshippers stood in an almost continuous crowd, silent, slowly moving in dubious obscurity. I caught one gleam of yellow light on prostrate forms among columns beyond, but a priest led me quietly into a vast chamber at the side, where were stabled the mystic figures of a dragon large as life, a flying kite and an elephant, all awaiting the great day when the god takes to his car and moves in glory through the streets, seated beneath the mystic tree, which also was standing there. From a hidden and cavernous safe the priest then displayed a flashing wealth of emeralds and rubies, unnumbered as the Milky Way and, possibly, surpassing their own value by their holiness. Disappearing for a while, after shutting the safe, he returned with a pink garland, thick as a liner’s hawser, and hung it round my neck, where already two white garlands hung, for I had been received with honour by a political club just before I came. But this new pink garland nearly touched my feet. It had been an offering to the shrine, and came to me cold from the neck of the god himself.

Thus sanctified and adorned, I passed back into the throng of worshippers in the temple court, and presently felt among them a peculiar stir of excitement, which I naturally attributed to my unusual appearance, just visible in the darkness. But when I was conducted by the Brahman to a large private house overlooking the precincts, for the first time in India I failed to receive the usual Hindu welcome. The rooms and courtyards glimmered with little lamps. Seated in the verandah before the door, a band of pipers, blowing as they pleased, drove dull care away—far away, one hoped, for her sake. Gods, kites, and elephants of painted alabaster were arranged in neat rows upon the table of an inner room, and little girls, dressed in the gorgeous silks and embroideries of Southern India, tended them with lights and flowers. But the master of the house, himself a temple guardian, politely expressed an unwillingness to receive the foreigner, and when I turned back among the excited crowd that swarmed round me under the temple colonnade, I heard for the first time the wild shout of “Bande Mataram! Bande Mataram!” (Hail to the Motherland!) rising on every side. If a Brahman had not been my guide, I should have supposed the outcry to be due to religious indignation. He told me afterwards it was in compliment to my Liberal opinions. But I think it was not in compliment to my English clothes, which were far more conspicuous than my Liberal opinions.

There is no part of India where the anti-English feeling was less to be expected than in Madras. Here the Hindu is seen at his mildest, here he asks least of this fleeting world, and accepts destiny with the gentlest quietude. If ever there was a country easy to govern, it should be Southern India; and in time past no part of India has surrendered itself more unreservedly to British rule or trusted more confidently to British justice. Much of this friendliness has been due to the influence of our missionaries, represented by some very remarkable men in Madras. I do not know their statistics of conversion: I think they must be very low, especially as the Bishop of Madras, during my visit, was expressing his despair of ever converting educated Indians, and was urging his clergy to pay attention only to the lowest castes. But the missionary influence upon education itself has been very large. It has created one famous and excellent institution, and a popular restaurant besides. It is chiefly the cause, I suppose, of the widespread knowledge of English among all classes in the city. More than this, I found that in Madras and other parts of India, as I had seen in Nigeria, Central Africa, and South Africa—even in Macedonia and Armenia also—the missionaries do maintain a certain standard of justice to the credit of the “White Man,” or “European,” and that the oppressed and destitute, even among the classes below the protection of any caste, do actually turn to them with the assurance of finding a quality of mercy and sympathetic understanding not very remote from their profession of brotherhood in Christ. It is easy to join in the taunt about “Famine Christians,” and to point to the curve of conversions varying directly with the price of food. But if we were starving, I suppose most of us would gladly profess any religion in the world for a prospect of regular meals, and the important thing is that by the missionaries no class is neglected or left to feel itself outcast from humanity—not even the poor fishers on the sands south of the town, or the dwellers in savage huts that let at fourpence a month, and are sublet among different families.

Missionaries have done much, and so has a succession of good governors, from the time of Sir Thomas Munro, to whose memory the temple bell still rings a special chime before service. Our own people have forgotten him for three generations now, but I have seen the Hindu women drop their baskets and bow their heads as they passed his equestrian statue on “the Island”—an honour seldom paid to equestrian statues at home. He it was who reduced the taxes and watered the land and executed justice; and so his memory lives. Taught by his example, the people used to recognize that there were some things we English could do: we could organize drainage, and build bridges to stand, and decide quarrels without taking bribes. So they were content to leave these comparatively unimportant concerns in our hands, while they devoted themselves to the only two occupations that matter much—the growth of food and the worship of God. If their faith in our peculiar powers is declining, and they are themselves making new claims upon government and public life, the change is due to underlying causes, which are affecting the whole of India in varying degrees, and have already produced a new sense of unity in opposition.

Unhappily, the grievance of Anglo-Indian manners is not peculiar to Madras. The attitude of the vulgar among Anglo-Indians towards the people of the country would be incredible to any one who had not seen it, and the vulgar are a large and increasing class. They increase by a kind of infection, and the deterioration of a new-comer who has been sent out with the usual instincts of our educated classes in favour of politeness and decency, is often as unconscious as it is rapid. The pressure of his social surroundings is almost irresistible. If he does not wish to cut himself off altogether from the society and amusements of his own people, he will be driven to conform to the code of insolence established among them. To stand alone against feminine dislike and masculine views of good-form requires a toughness of character and an indifference to personal reputation or advancement which one cannot expect from many of the young Englishmen and Englishwomen who come out. These usually spring from a caste bred upon rather rigid observances, and they look to the opinion of their own caste almost entirely for the sanction of conduct. At first they are astonished that Anglo-Indian opinion not only permits but imposes so ill-bred a manner in intercourse with “natives,” but the astonishment soon wears off, and the infection of arrogance catches them as a matter of course. The Governor of Bombay once told me it was impossible to convert “bounders” into gentlemen by Act of Parliament, and, unfortunately, that is true; else we might enjoy a more enviable reputation in the world. But I was astonished to find how easily an apparent gentleman may become entirely the opposite if he finds himself set up as one of a superior race among a polite and gentle people, always too much inclined to submit to rudeness with reverential astonishment.

Dr. Lefroy, the Bishop of Lahore, who for a quarter of a century has striven with constancy and some success to restore the higher tradition of our race, has said that, but for railways, all might be well. And it is quite true that the commonest and most flagrant instances of Anglo-Indian vulgarity are to be found in trains. But that is chiefly because it is most often in trains that the two races meet on terms of nominal equality. On almost every railway journey one sees instances of ill-manners that would appear too outrageous for belief at home. But it is the same throughout. In hotels, clubs, bungalows, and official chambers, the people of the country, and especially the educated classes, are treated with an habitual contumely more exasperating than savage persecution. I gladly admit that in every part of India I found Englishmen who still retained the courtesy and sensitiveness of ordinary good manners. But one’s mere delight in finding them proved their rarity. Anglo-Indians tell us constantly that our first thought must be to maintain our national prestige, and if arrogance will do it, our prestige is safe. But when I watched the Anglo-Indian behaviour towards Indians themselves, I often wondered whether prestige is really to be secured by manners such as we should hardly find among “bounders” at home. For myself, I should have thought Lord Morley was right when he said that “bad manners, overbearing manners, are very disagreeable in all countries, but India is the only country where bad and overbearing manners are a political crime.”[31]

Unhappily, the justice of Indian complaints on this subject was not new to me, when I came to Madras. Every one finds proofs of it from the moment of landing in Bombay, and, in fact, even on board ship. The social estrangement between the two races rapidly increases after Port Said is left. But in Madras I found another cause of deep dissatisfaction. In spite of all I had heard about injustice in particular cases, in spite of the old demand for police reform and the separation of the judicial and executive functions now combined in the District Magistrate, it was disconcerting to discover a prevailing and uneasy suspicion that British justice could not safely be trusted. Certainly, much disquietude had recently been roused by a few special instances, at Rawal Pindi, Lahore, and elsewhere. “Killing no murder, outrage no crime, when Indians are concerned and Englishmen the culprits”: that was the common conclusion, and it was not unnatural.

But the suspicion arose from more general and permanent causes as well. There remains the standing sense of wrong, because an Englishman has the right to a different form of trial from an Indian. A magistrate with power to inflict a two years’ sentence on an Indian, may inflict only six months on a European. No Indian may try a criminal case against a European, and in criminal cases a European may claim a jury, with a majority of Europeans on it. Lord Ripon’s attempt gradually to modify these distinctions is one of the well-remembered events of his famous Viceroyalty—one of the many reasons which have endeared his name to India as no other Viceroy’s is endeared—but his endeavour was thwarted.

As to the separation of functions, the Viceroy’s Council, through Sir Harvey Adamson, has lately (March, 1908) promised an experiment with this purpose in Eastern Bengal; but in India generally the District Magistrate who tries cases himself, or arranges for their trial by his subordinates, also controls the police, and in nearly all cases the police bring the charge. The injustice of this arrangement, with all its opportunities for official influence on legal decisions, has long been so obvious that one would have thought the cost of the change was the only obstacle to it. But while I did not hear much about the danger of increased cost, I heard a great deal about the danger of diminished dignity, if the District Magistrate lost either half of his functions. After a battle of over half a century, we may hope, however, that this grievance is now to disappear.

On the other hand, I found that the old scandals about the police had survived Sir Andrew Fraser’s commission of inquiry (1902). Promotion still went in practice by the number of convictions obtained, and convictions too often depended on evidence derived by the police from the accused themselves—so-called “confessions,” extorted by means which, rightly or wrongly, were spoken of with horror among the people, and even among Anglo-Indians. Between his arrest and his sentence the prisoner was left in the hands of the police, and at their mercy, thus giving them the opportunity of compelling him to give evidence to his own detriment. Wherever I went in India I heard the same complaint of the unscrupulousness and corruption of the police. Some of the British police officers with whom I became intimate, appeared to be experienced and sympathetic men, struggling rather hopefully on the side of reform. But the pay of the ordinary native policeman is so ludicrously small (from 8s. to 10s. a month), even when the low scale of wages in India is considered, that the constant temptation to extortion can hardly be resisted, especially among a population so indifferent to this world and so deferential to authority, that even the innocent will volunteer bribes in hopes of being left in peace.

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.

Dance of High Caste Girls in Madras.

[Face p. 122.

One wealthy Hindu had ventured even in manufacture to follow the extreme party which said: “Let the English go their way. We will ask no share in their government and take none. We will neither appeal to their law courts nor accept salaries as their officials. We must pay their taxes, but otherwise we will forget that these foreigners are among us at all.” He had determined to set up a cotton works without the aid even of imported machinery. Collecting members of the old weaving caste, he erected a bamboo factory of hand-looms, where they were turning out the beautiful fabrics of Indian work, little more expensive than the English machine-made stuffs and four times as durable. The experiment is exposed to some of the dangers of conscious revivals—the dangers of “Arts and Crafts.” But hand-loom weaving still retains a quite natural life in many parts of India, in spite of the British manufacturers’ long endeavours to kill the Indian weaving industry. When I visited his simple factory among the palms north of Madras, he told me he could not keep pace with the demands of the Hindu women. And if the women who buy cotton cloth for their saris and children’s bits of clothing are willing to give a few farthings more for native and national work, in a district where they have to toil all day for a wage of twopence, it shows that the national spirit, even in philosophic and devotional Madras, is reaching far beyond the limits of the class that our own most highly educated classes taunt and sneer at as “educated Indians.”