the most atrocious form.  Most of the native underlings are utterly venal and corrupt.  Increased pay does not mean decrease of knavery.  Cheating, and lying, and taking bribes, and abuse of authority are ingrained into their very souls; and all the cut and dry formulas of namby pamby philanthropists, the inane maunderings of stay-at-home sentimentalists, the wise saws of self-opinionated theorists, who know nothing of the Hindoo as he really shews himself to us in daily and hourly contact with him, will ever persuade me that native, as opposed to English rule, would be productive of aught but burning oppression and shameless venality, or would end in anything but anarchy and chaos.

It sounds very well in print, and increases the circulation of a paper or two among the Baboos, to cry out that our task is to elevate the oppressed and ignorant millions of the East, to educate them into self-government, to make them judges, officers, lawgivers, governors over all the land.  To vacate our place and power, and let the Baboo and the Bunneah, to whom we have given the glories of Western civilization, rule in our place, and guide the fortunes of these toiling millions who owe protection and peace to our fostering rule.  It is a noble sentiment to resign wealth, honour, glory, and power; to give up a settled government; to alter a policy that has welded the conflicting elements of Hindustan into one stable whole; to throw up our title of conqueror, and disintegrate a mighty empire.  For what?  A sprinkling of thinly-veneered, half-educated natives, want a share of the loaves and fishes in political scrambling, and a few inane people of the ‘man and brother’ type, cry out at home to let them have their way.

No.  Give the Hindoo education, equal laws, protection to life and property; develop the resources of the country; foster all the virtues you can find in the native mind; but till you can give him the energy, the integrity, the singleness of purpose, the manly, honourable straightforwardness of the Anglo-Saxon; his scorn of meanness, trickery, and fraud; his loyal single-heartedness to do right; his contempt for oppression of the weak; his self-dependence; his probity.  But why go on?  When you make Hindoos honest, truthful, God-fearing Englishmen, you can let them govern themselves; but as soon ’may the leopard change his spots,’ as the Hindoo his character.  He is wholly unfit for self-government; utterly opposed to honest, truthful, stable government at all.  Time brings strange changes, but the wisdom which has governed the country hitherto, will surely be able to meet the new demand that may be made upon it in the immediate present, or in the far distant future.

CHAPTER XV.

Jungle wild fruits.—­Curious method of catching quail.—­Quail nets.  —­Quail caught in a blacksmith’s shop.—­Native wrestling.—­The trainer.—­How they train for a match.—­Rules of wrestling.—­Grips.  —­A wrestling match.—­Incidents of the struggle.—­Description of a match between a Brahmin and a blacksmith.—­Sparring for the grip.—­The blacksmith has it.—­The struggle.—­The Brahmin getting the worst of it.—­Two to one on the little ’un!—­The Brahmin plays the waiting game, turns the tables and the blacksmith.—­Remarks on wrestling.