more accurate information than by any other plan that I could follow. This will be especially true in regard to the public administration; for notwithstanding my warnings about the danger of generalisations, the main structure of the government throughout British India. has been built up on not very various lines.

I propose to take as my example of an Indian province the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. I choose them because I know them best. A large part of my Indian service was spent in them, and I have been, as Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Commissioner, at the head of their administration.

These provinces lie within the great Indo-Gangetic plain. They comprise nearly all the upper portion of the basin of the Ganges and Jumna, from their sources in the Himalaya to the borders of Bengal. They are one of the most homogeneous of the great provinces of India, in the aspect of the country and in the condition and character of their inhabitants. They cover about 82,000 square miles, and contain about 33,000,000 people.

Oudh, excepting on the north, where its boundary is the Himalayan State of Nepál, is surrounded by districts of the North-Western Provinces. It contains 24,000 square miles, and more than 11,000,000 people.

Physically, there are no important differences between the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, the whole forming together one continuous alluvial plain, broken only by the rivers which intersect it; but politically, the two provinces have been, until some years ago, under separate administrations. Oudh became British territory in 1856; it was partially amalgamated with the NorthWestern Provinces in 1877; and although there are

pro

still many differences in the revenue and judicial systems of the two provinces, they have become virtually a single province under a Lieutenant-Governor, whose head-quarters are at Allahabad. The united vince covers 106,000 square miles, with a population of 44,000,000. Its area is not much smaller, and its population is larger than that of Great Britain and Ireland. If we exclude the mountainous and thinly-peopled districts of the Himálaya, there is no country in Europe excepting Belgium in which the population is so dense. The average number of persons to the square mile in Belgium is 485, and in England and Wales, 446; in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh it is 460. No other Indian province is so thickly peopled; in Bengal, which most nearly approaches it, the average number to the square mile is 360.

Throughout this great tract, although there are many differences of dialect, the people generally speak the same language, Hindi. The mixed language called Urdu, or Hindustani, which has become a lingua franca, very generally understood throughout a great part of India, grew up in the Northern provinces in the time of the Mohammedan sovereigns. Its grammar is mainly Hindi, while in its vocabulary there is a large admixture of Persian and Arabic, the languages of the Mussulman invaders. Urdu is the literary and official language of the North-West; it is commonly spoken in the towns and by the upper classes, and especially by the Mohammedans.

This has been for ages the most famous part of India. In pre-historic times it was the Central or Middle land, the Madhya-desha of the sacred books of the Hindus and of the ancient poets, the abode of the solar and lunar races, and of the gods and heroes of the Máhá

bharata and Rámáyana. To say nothing of the more or less mythical cities of which little but the names remain, this tract contains the most holy places of India-Benares, Ajodhya, Kanauj, Muttra, and many others. It was here that Buddha was born and preached and died, and it was from this centre that his creed spread over a great part of the Eastern world. In more modern times Hindustan was the chief seat of the Mohammedan power. Delhi and Agra became the capitals of the Afghán and Moghul sovereigns, and although the great majority of the population always remained Hindu, there was for many centuries no part of India in which Mussulman authority and organisation were so complete. In our own times this has been politically the most important portion of our Indian Empire. To the native imagination,' as Mr. Keene has observed, Hindustan is still the centre of India, and Delhi is still the metropolis.'1

I referred in my last lecture to the unfortunate fact that the history of British India has still to be written, and to the inaccuracy of the well-known history of James Mill. I gave one illustration, taken from the story of the sale of the Rohillas by Warren Hastings, and their destruction. Some other events connected with the history of the last century which have impressed themselves indelibly on the minds of Englishmen occurred in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, and have been almost equally misrepresented; but this is a subject into which I cannot now

enter.

The North-Western Provinces came into our possession between 1775 and 1803. Until 1833 they were governed from Calcutta as a part of the so-called Bengal 1 Keene's Moghul Empire.

presidency; in that year a separate government under a Lieutenant-Governor was constituted for them. These provinces and Oudh were the principal scene of the mutinies of 1857. Before that year the seat of the Government of the North-Western Provinces was at Agra; it was then transferred to Allahabad, and has remained there. Delhi, which until 1857 had belonged to the North-Western Provinces, has been since that time under the Government of the Punjab.

Sir Henry Maine, referring to Northern India, has spoken of the monotony of life and ennui 'caused by its ungenial climate and the featureless distances of its plains,' and he quotes the words of the Emperor Baber, the founder of the Moghul dynasty, on closing the history of his conquest :—

'Hindustan is a country that has few pleasures to recommend it. The country and towns are extremely ugly. The people are not handsome. The chief excellency of Hindustan is that it is a very large country, and that it has abundance of gold and silver.'

I cannot deny that immense tracts in Northern India, and precisely those of which English travellers see the most, deserve, for a portion of the year, the epithets of monotonous and featureless and ugly. There is, for the most part, no luxuriance of vegetation; during the hot dry months, when the crops have been cut everything is burnt up by the fiery winds; the ground is almost everywhere highly cultivated, but all is brown and arid. At other seasons, although a country so absolutely flat can hardly escape being monotonous, there is, the towns apart, as much to admire in the plains of Northern India as in those of France, and more than in those of Northern Germany.

I spoke in my first lecture of the great physical

differences between this part of India and Bengal. In the rainy season and winter, travelling along the railway through the central parts of the North-Western Provinces, a distance of more than 500 miles, the whole country through which you pass is a continuous sheet of rich cultivation, studded with groves of mango, the most valuable of the fruit-bearing trees of India, a constant succession of thriving villages, many prosperous towns, and not a few great and famous cities. It would be difficult to find in any part of the world, on so large a scale, a more striking prospect of industry and quiet contentment; and if, judging by a European standard, the traveller sees few signs of wealth, he sees almost none of extreme poverty. Nearly the whole of the agricultural population is collected in villages, between which stretch the wide unbroken fields. There are few of those scattered homesteads which are so often seen in Europe. This feature of rural life, a consequence of the universal insecurity which until the present century had prevailed from time immemorial, is common throughout India.

In the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, as everywhere else in India, the mass of the population is agricultural, and the number of non-agriculturists is smaller than would be supposed from the figures of the census. A large proportion of the people returned as engaged in trades and employments are village servants and village shopkeepers who belong in fact to the agricultural community. It is probable that 90 per cent. of the whole population are so closely connected with the land that they may properly be called agricultural.

There is, however, no part of India in which large cities and towns are so numerous. Lucknow has 260,000