Indian Government, and of, at least, the English merchants. There is not, I suppose, in all the world a more exposed coast. Of harbour there is not a vestige; vessels at anchor are exposed to every wind that blows. There is no creek even into which a vessel could run in a cyclone or a storm. Is it not humiliating to think that our oldest possession in India sees, year by year, trade driven away to other parts for want of a shelter which could be so easily provided? Is it not still more surprising that English merchants, whose vessels several times in a generation have been strewn in such fearful numbers and such terrific wrecks on this hopeless shore, should rest satisfied till they had secured what no humane or even politic government would refuse to sanction and aid if once the question were fairly pushed home. In the case that came under my own observation, if the sea had been ever so little rougher we could not have taken in a ton of cargo, or even have landed on the shore. Whether there should be a close harbour, as some wish, or a mere breakwater, as others suggest, is a question of engineering.

The close-harbour people are met by the objection that the many and rapid currents on the coast would soon silt the harbour up, as Port Said certainly is being silted up both inside and outside, and the engineer (Mr. Parkes, who made the Kurrachee harbour) proposes two piers at right angles from the shore, with a breakwater in front. This would cost half a million of money. Chiefly, however, there is the creation of some defence, and it would be to the glory of Lord Salisbury's rule if he saw the work set spiritedly on foot. He, if any one, could direct the "colonial" spirit into an imperial aim, and set his foot on all semblance of jobbery.

Madras is also on its own part vigorously pushing on its railway system, and carrying out its ideas of drainage, with a laudable sense of what is needed for health and comfort. Its English town is laid out in inclosures, skirted by hedgerows, which remind one of Kent. The green is of the greenest. The ex

perimental and model farms are pushed on with cheerful liberality. Instructions in farming, as to the use of tools, seeds, &c., are placed within the reach of every native agriculturist, as, indeed, they are thoughout India. An English lady takes charge of a Nellore cow, and in about four months, by careful feeding, its weight is increased by 143 pounds, and its yield of milk doubled, a result of which to be proud. Hindoo prejudice, it is true, stands in the way of cow-killing, as Mahomedan prejudice stands in the way of pig-eating, but "Mutton Clubs" (an institution) clash with no prejudice, and fowls you may eat all India through. Madras is great in fowls. Its Bramapootras and Dorkings, and methods of hatching, would delight a fowl-fancier. It is experimenting with Paddy, Tapioca (suggested as a crop by the First Prince of Trevandrum) Areca nuts, Prairie grass, Chinese sugar-cane, all manner of manures, ploughs, and all else belonging to agriculture. The superintendent of these operations, Mr. Robertson, tells with pride of one great improvement made in a "combined plough" by a native blacksmith, who received £5 Ior his ingenuity. Akbar would probably have made him a grandee, and would certainly have made him a notable and wealthy man. I wish I had space to append some notes from Dr. Cornish's census report, but I must be content with a few bare figures. "In the whole Presidency there are about 11,610,000 persons who speak the Telugu language; Tamil, 14,715,000; Canarese, 1,699,000; Malayalum, 2,324,000; Tulu, 29,400; Ooriya and Hill languages, 640,000. Of the whole population 28,863,978 are Hindoos, 1,857,857 Mahomedans, 490,299 Native Christians, 14,505 Europeans, 26,374 East Indians or Eurasians, 21,254 Jains, and 6,910 are undistinguished as to their nationality or religion." The Mahomedans are in large numbers wherever they preceded us in administration, chiefly on the seaboard. The native Christians are a compact body, and, as I have said, a considerable extent, Roman

to

Catholics. The Eurasians here as elsewhere are certainly not increasing, a most painful fact when probed below the surface of common life. I shall refer to this and to Missions in Madras in my concluding paper.

Of cooly emigrants Madras sends every year from 70,000 to 100,000 to Ceylon, and about three-fourths of that number return yearly to India. The engagements are not for long terms, as in the case of those for the West Indies. I paid close attention to the latter, as I found them in the places where the coolies are enlisted, and in Calcutta, where I visited two of the more notable depots-those of Trinidad and Jamaica-and I came to the conclusion that hardly anything more important of a civilizing character exists in India. It is something to induce a Hindoo to cross the sea; it is a marvel when you induce a Brahmin to do so; the emigration agents have done both. I saw Brahmins both going and returning. To what extent the out-going and returning classes differ I scarcely know how to describe to the general reader. But a few facts will show much. First, the intending emigrants cannot leave their native districts without clear proof that their enlistment is voluntary. Of course this has in some cases been evaded, but the rule holds good. Next they are examined by a government officer; their food and blankets and much besides are regulated by law.

The examination of the vessel and the law against overcrowding enters into most minute particulars. On landing in the colony they are met by like laws, and in short the cooly finds that in a few months he has grown into a man, his earnings accumulating with wonderful provisions for their security, and there is for everyone a fair prospect of a return home comfortably provided for. I had full particulars of a case in which a body of coolies in Trinidad actually subscribed to present their employer with a horse, because, having put the question to him why he walked instead of riding, he had replied that he "couldn't afford" the latter. Well,

they replied, they could, and they bought the horse and fed it. I could give a score of instances of poor men becoming wealthy, and several well attested cases came to me of men who had from the ordinary cooly grade risen to be great landowners or flourishing store-keepers, with stores in different parts of the islands. Of course, there is the dark side too. There are aimless, objectless people, as there are in England. Fevers break out, a cooly with small-pox escapes medical scrutiny and infects a ship, a constitution built up on rice gives way before the voyage is half over. Then, among so many employers there must be bad grasping men. Anyone who expected cooly emigration apart from these evils could hardly know much of human nature. Let the evils be rigorously watched, but do not let us in any fit of philanthropy stop this wholesome trade. It is said-influential officials have said that India has not sufficient labour for its own needs. Then let India command the labour by increased inducements to industry, and in that only natural way stop the emigration. In any other case let us hope the emigration will continue. It makes the men really men, and the women really women, possessors of property independent even of their husbands, and induces content by supplying motives for living and working.

From Madras to Ceylon is a change in more than the mere distance might suggest; the transition is one from the vast machinery of a government of great magnitude to one characterized by peculiarities to which India presents no counterpart. The present governor, Mr. Gregory, of Galway steam-packet fame, is king in his domain, and certainly at the offset was popular. The Kandyan chiefs, some time ago, in their Eastern manner, sang in an address of "his innumerable virtues," and described him as one who takes with the tip of his finger and displays the door of water out of the vast ocean; . . . . who has showered great pleasure upon all his subjects, as the sun illuminating the whole universe

In

opens the fields of lotuses, and sheds brightness in all directions." Would this be in any way new to Galway or is it what Galway knew long before Mr. Gregory went to the East? The coast of Ceylon, like that of Madras, is exposed and stormy, and you enter the dominion of this governor of innumerable virtues in the peculiar boat known by name all the world over as the catamaran, or by the outrigger canoe, a hollow tree, with long spars extended on both sides and resting horizontally on the water. When the sea is a little rough a man sits at the end of each spar; when it becomes rougher there are two men in place of the one; when it becomes rougher still, there are three; and according to the number required it is a "one man," "two men," or "three men gale," or storm. Ceylon, the coffee-planter's interest is foremost in importance. The conversation turns on coffee; it is the first word one hears, and the last. Some Dutch conclave at Rotterdam or somewhere is keeping down prices, you are told, and English planters will certainly be ruined, unless light railways to the plantations can be had, and a harbour. Indeed, there are facts which do seem to warrant anxiety. The planter's life is in itself far from what some people suppose when the scene is painted from a distance. Rising at five in the morning, mustering coolies and setting them to work, then riding over the plantation till nightfall, his food often carried by runners some miles in advance, and sometimes missing the mark, are features of life not quite romantic, even though the scenery may be of the most inviting character, and the prospects of the season good. Apart from the purchase of land, now ranging from 81. to 12. an acre, the cost of clearing and "filling in" the ground, building a house, and planting a nursery for a plantation of 100 acres, was, in a case with respect to which I had the figures, at least 9001. After that there is the daily routine to which I have referred, and the anxieties which at times seem serious as to the markets. The coolies, upon the whole, appear to have the same good character in Ceylon that No. 191.-VOL. XXXII.

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they have in the West Indies. Their sanitary condition is well looked to, while the Cinghalese in the plains, especially in the Western Province, seem all but utterly neglected. A short time before I was in Colombo, a fell disease had raged among a poor population for fully six weeks before a European was sent to the district. An official report said of one such part (Negombo), "The tanks or pools of water, of which there are many, emit a putrid smell, contain large quantities of organic matter undergoing decomposition, and form the receptacles of the refuse of houses around them; the water itself is black as ink and teems with animalculæ." And this is the island of whose balminess Bishop Heber sang so sweetly, and of which English congregations will sing in the same verse for many decades of years to come; the island, too, to which every faithful Hindoo looks with such strange longing as the refuge of the great Ram in his time of sore distress, corresponding to the "Flight into Egypt" of the Christian, and the "Hegira" of the Mahomedan. The "balmy breezes' are but a name in some places, though there are spots to which the term aptly enough applies. Materially the island has advanced wonderfully. The people tell you with some pride (perhaps forgetting the value of India to them), that Ceylon was the first colony that relieved the mother country of the cost of defence. Their revenue is constantly increasing, and they boast an invariable surplus. The railway from Colombo to Kandy, now eighty-seven miles long, pays 8 per cent. A wide district, "the Wilderness of Adam's Creek," fifteen years ago counted as the great forest reserve of the Crown, is cleared, and from one spot you might look upon 40,000 acres of land under coffee cultivation. In this I am writing from information solely. I saw little of Ceylon. But however the planters stand, the poor natives of the island seem to present few marks of improvement. Scant food and few friends are all one can say with respect to them.

"

In quitting Ceylon you may be said

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to quit India, but you are far from quitting Indian trade and associations. Passing between the Maldive and Laccadive ("the hundred thousand ") coral islands you find scores of fine vessels threading their way amid the innumerable fishing-boats and the cocoa-nut clad specks of land, the property of a primitive, and to all appearance peaceful people, who lie on their oars to watch and talk about each steamer or other large vessel as she passes. From Minicoy, with its population of 3,000, Findley's maritime directory tells us a kind of tribute or present of cocoa nuts and fish is yearly carried to the Governor of Ceylon in return for the protection he gives or is supposed to give the people. Apart from this, the islanders may, for all practical purposes, be as secluded from Europe as Robinson Crusoe was. They have little to sell, and less wherewith to buy; they are in most respects a law unto themselves. A little farther you catch a view, if you care to sit up for it, of the Southern Cross, and the consciousness it gives you of standing between two worlds will repay more than one sleepless night. It is not always pleasant to watch the northern constellations nightly growing less in size; it must generally be pleasant, especially to an old Indian, to watch them nightly growing larger, and more clearly defined, till Charles's Wain again becomes what it was when last seen, with real pleasure or real pain, over the cliffs of Dover. You might pass many watchful days, however, before you had a view we had a good view of the transit of Venus. An extraordinary black spot it was, the captain said, having, in spite of previous resolutions and a marked almanack, for the moment forgotten what a rare phenomenon we had an opportunity of seeing. With the first sight of African land you come to one of the perils of the canal trade-the black coast of Cape Guardafui, without a light of any kind, or any reasonable chance of one. We approached it in this case on a fine afternoon, when the dreary sandhills looked their best, and

even then they seemed to warn off intrusion from Africa. I had before seen them in worse weather, when they are still less pleasant. At their worst they have been silent witnesses of many dreadful stories of the sea. Some time ago Sir Bartle Frere drew attention to the need there was for a light here. Not long after three canal steamers ran on the coast, and were lost. Yet still there is no practical effort for the light. Often the land cannot be seen till you are close upon it, and every new vessel sent through the canal is an additional argument for some attempt being made to mark so dangerous a spot. It is improbable that the canal can long continue under its present restrictions, and impossible that it can ever again be closed. Surely it would be practicable to employ a few men, at a day and a half's steam from Aden, to afford the safeguard of a light to our ever-increasing fleet of vessels on the Red Sea route to India and China.

Aden itself is essentially Indian, although it is the converging point of many different streams of commerce from China, Australia, Japan, and Southern Africa, as well as from India, which was one object in view when the Cinder fortress was first occupied. Looked at cursorily you see a small settlement of Parsees, Frenchmen and others engaged in trade; a strangely mixed race of boy divers, who perhaps were never born, and in all probability never die or grow older; shoals of porpoises and bonitos, which appear to have played gymnastics before your vessel from the Laccadives onward; a British garrison, which tries to wile away time in amateur theatricals, in trying to make shrubs grow on hard volcanic cinder, in watching the hosts of vessels coming and going homeward and outward, and in dreaming bright dreams of orders for the regiment's removal to any place on the face of the earth away from Aden; and finally you see those wonderful water tanks which attest an earlier and not less important occupation than our own -Persian probably. Looked at below the surface you see the tapping at Aden of

a strange land, feather-sellers who have themselves, or by their agents, been far inland, chasing the ostrich to adorn bonnets in Regent Street-descendants of Shem and of Ham working together to bring tribute to and draw tribute from the descendants of Japheth; and then, perhaps most curious fact of all, the Jew keeping his Sabbath on that bleak arid African coast, without a sacrificing priest, as religiously as he keeps it in his holy places in civilized and safe lands. We arrived at Aden on a Saturday, and, as usual, plenty of feathers and curiosities were purchased, but none from a Jew. Here were these men, in appearance Afghan, with loose, unwashed cotton clothes, living in the desert, eager for gain to an extent which has become a proverb, reckless, perhaps, of all life but their own, yet keeping their Sabbath as strictly as if the law from Sinai had only been given yesterday. It is, perhaps, worth more than a passing thought, too, how even Aden adds in this way to the strange number of races, from Western China to the Persian Gulf, and from thence, not merely down to Zanzibar, but actually into the very heart of Africa, that are influenced by the Indian Government. Aden itself is governed from Bombay, and has its place in the official reports of the Presidency, and Zanzibar never can be thought of without a reference to Oman, and the impulses and dynasties Wahabee, or what not-of the lands bordering on the Gulf and of the deserts beyond them. Those tanks, environed by ravines, and constructed to hold so many millions of gallons of water, the store for six months of absolutely dry weather, tell a story many centuries old, of the struggles of the old civilizations from the Arab side of the Red Sea, and the old barbarisms from the African side, ending only when the iron strength of Europe was cast into the scale.

Our

cantonment is pretty and in some parts green, with even a banyan treethat famous tree which, in the East, throws down branch after branch, to

become stem after stem, till in time regiments (people say a small army) may encamp under the one tree. I wish some of the gentlemen who talk so glibly among us of human progress, of the prospects of sword being beaten into ploughshare and spear into pruninghook, all the world over, by means of the influences which come from English Sunday and day-schools, temperance lectures, May meetings, and political associations, could look now and then on these dim shore-lines and the dimmer populations beyond. I asked the captain of our vessel on which side of the sea he would, in case of extremity, prefer to run his vessel if he had that choice and no other. He said, "The African decidedly." I once put the same question to a captain of the Peninsular and Oriental Company, and he replied, "Well, the Arabian." Neither had the remotest idea what would occur in either case, except that however solitary the place might be the ship would in an hour be surrounded by boats manned by unsparing robbers. The present and future of the Red Sea have no better index than the character of the vessels one meets upon it-the French Admiral, bound for Aden; a British iron-clad, engaged at gun practice; a Dutch transport crowded with troops, fine young fellows they seemed, for Acheen; mail vessels and trading vessels of all nations, with any number of the boats of old times. Few Englishmen abroad talk much of English influences and swords beaten into ploughshares. At home you may have good arguments for ceding Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, but they would fall on hard ground in India. "Give up Gibraltar, Malta, Aden ?—I should like to see the day." That is the spirit of Englishmen in other lands, and that, somehow, is why Mr. Gladstone's popularity (very real and permanent at home) never found any marked response abroad. People dreaded that he might take a fit of "giving up" something, the value of which is only known where the something exists. Call the feeling as we may, you scarcely ever meet an Englishman in the East who has the least inclination нн 2