a gradual and perceptible improvement in their condition, which is encouraged by the authorities in every possible way.  And as fast as they show themselves competent they are trusted with the responsibility of the welfare of themselves and their neighbors.  The habitual attitude of the Hindu is crouching upon the ground.  The British government is trying to raise him to a standing posture, to make him a man instead of the slave of his superstitions.

No one can visit India, no one can read its history or study its statistics, without admitting the success and recognizing the blessings of British occupation.  The government has had its ups and downs.  There have been terrible blunders and criminal mistakes, which we are in danger of repeating in the Philippine Islands, but the record of British rule during the last half-century—­since the Sepoy mutiny, which taught a valuable lesson at an awful cost—­has been an almost uninterrupted and unbroken chapter of peace, progress and good government.  Until then the whole of India never submitted to a single ruler.  For nearly a thousand years it was a perpetual battlefield, and not since the invasion of Alexander the Great have the people enjoyed such liberty or tranquillity as they do today.  Three-eighths of the country still remains under the authority of hereditary native rulers with various degrees of independence.  Foreigners have very little conception of the extent and the power of the native government.  We have an indefinable impression that the rajah is a sensuous, indolent, extravagant sybarite, given to polo, diamonds and dancing girls, and amputates the heads of his subjects at pleasure; but that is very far from the truth.  Many of the princes in the list just given, are men of high character, culture and integrity, who exercise a wise, just and patriarchal authority over their subjects.  Seventeen of the rajputs (rashpootes, it is pronounced) represent the purest and bluest Hindu blood, for they are descended from Rama, the hero of the Ramayama, the great Hindu poem, who is generally worshiped as an incarnation of the god Bishnu; and their subjects are all their kinsmen, descended from the same ancestors, members of the same family, and are treated as such.  Other rajahs have a relationship even more clannish and close, and most of them are the descendants of long lines of ancestors who have occupied the same throne and exercised the same power over the same people from the beginning of history.  None of the royal families of Europe can compare with them in length of pedigree or the dimensions of their family trees, and while there have been bad men as well as good men in the lists of native rulers; while the people have been crushed by tyranny, ruined by extravagance and tortured by the cruelty of their masters, the rajahs of India have averaged quite as high as the feudal lords of Germany or the dukes and earls of England in ability and morality.

It has been the policy of Lord Curzon since he has been Viceroy to extend the power and increase the responsibility of the native princes as much as possible, and to give India the largest measure of home rule that circumstances and conditions will allow.  Not long ago, at the investiture of the Nawab of Bahawalpur, who had succeeded to the throne of his father, the Viceroy gave a distinct definition of the relationship between the native princes and the British crown.