Trading Society being made agents for the Government. The result was the extraordinary prosperity of the company, and the leaving by the merchant-king of a private fortune of fabulous

amount.

The Dutch system has been defended by every conceivable kind of blind misrepresentation; it has even been declared, by writers who ought certainly to know better, that the four millions of surplus that Holland draws from Java, being profits on trade, are not taxation! Even the blindest admirers of the system are forced, however, to admit that it involves the absolute prohibition of missionary enterprise, and total exclusion from knowledge of the Java people.*

The Ceylon planters have at present political as well as financial difficulties on their hands. They have petitioned the Queen for "self-government for Ceylon," and for control of the revenue by "representatives of the public "-excellent principles, if "public" meant public, and "Ceylon," Ceylon; but, when we inquire of the planters what they really mean, we find that by "Ceylon" they understand Galle and Columbo Fort, and by "the public" they mean themselves. There are at present six unofficial members of the Council: of these, the whites have three members, the Dutch burghers one, and the natives two; and the planters expect the same proportions to be kept in a Council to which supreme power shall be entrusted in the disposition of the revenues. They are, indeed, careful to explain that they in no way desire the extension of representative institutions to Ceylon.

The first thing that strikes the English traveller in Ceylon is the apparent slightness of our hold upon the country. In my journey from Galle to Columbo, by early morning and mid-day, I met no white man; from Columbo to Kandy, I travelled with one, but met none; at Kandy, I saw no whites; at Nuwara Ellia, not half-a-dozen. On my return, I saw no whites between Nuwara Ellia and Ambe Pusse, where there was a white man in the railway-station; and on my return by evening from Columbo to Galle, in all the thronging crowds along the roads there was not a single European. There are hundreds

In 1875 I visited Java, and was most hospitably received by the Dutch officials, but I find nothing to change in this chapter.

cf Cinghalese in the interior who live and die, and never see a white man. Out of the two and a quarter millions of people who dwell in what the planters call the "colony of Ceylon," there are but 1300 persons, or about 500 grown-up men. The proposition of the Planters' Association is that we should confide the despotic government over two and a quarter millions of Buddhist, Mohamedan, and Hindoo labourers to these 500 English Christian employers. It is not the Ceylon planters who have a grievance against us, but we who have a serious complaint against them; so flourishing a dependency should certainly provide for all the costs of her defence.*

Some of the mountain views between Kandy and Nuwara Ellia are full of grandeur, though they lack the New Zealand snows; but none can match, for variety and colour, that which I saw on my return from the descent at the Kaduganava Pass,† where you look over a foreground of giant-leaved talipot and slender areca palms and tall bamboos, lit with the scarlet blooms of the cotton-tree, on to a plain dotted with banyantree groves and broken by wooded hills. On either side, the deep valley-bottoms are carpeted with bright green—the wet rice-lands, or terraced paddy-fields, from which the natives gather crop after crop throughout the year.

In the union of rich foliage with deep colour and grand forms, no scenery save that of New Zealand can bear comparison with that of the hill country of Ceylon, unless, indeed, it be the scenery of Java, and the far Eastern isles.

She nominally pays a little more than "the cost of the troops," but this is not the real cost as charged to India, but merely the pay and expenses in Ceylon.

The railway has since been made through this pass.

CHAPTER III.

MADRAS TO CALCUTTA.

SPENDING but a single day in Madras-an inferior ColumboI passed on to Calcutta with a pleasant remembrance of the air of prosperity that hangs about the chief city of what is still called by Bengal civilians "The Benighted Presidency." Small as are the houses, poor as are the shops, every one looks wellto-do, and everybody happy, from the not undeservedly famed cooks at the club to the catamaran men on the shore. and good government have of late done much for Madras.

Coffee

The surf consists of two lines of rollers, and is altogether inferior to the fine-weather swell on the west coast of New Zealand, and only to be dignified and promoted into surfship by men of that fine imagination which will lead them to sniff the spices a day before they reach Ceylon, or the pork and molasses when off Nantucket light-ship. The row through the first roller in the lumbering Massullah boat, manned by a dozen sinewy blacks, the waiting for a chance between the first and second lines of spray, and then the dash for shore, the crew singing their measured "Ah! lah! lálala !—ah! lah! lálala !" the stroke coming with the accented syllable, and the helmsman shrieking with excitement, is a more pretentious ceremony than that which accompanies the crossing of Hokitika bar, but the passage is a far less dangerous one. The Massullah boats are like empty hay-barges on the Thames, but built without nails, so that they "give" instead of breaking up when battered by the sand on one side and the seas upon the other. This is a very wise precaution in the case of boats which are always made to take the shore broadside on. The first sea that strikes the boat either shoots the passenger on to the dry sand, or puts him where he can easily be caught by the natives on

the beach, but the Massullah boat herself gets a terrible banging before the crew can haul her out of reach of the seas.

Sighting the Temple of Juggernauth and one palm-tree, but seeing no land, we entered the Hoogly, steaming between lighthouses, guard-ships, and buoys, but not catching a glimpse of the low land of the Sunderbunds till we had been many hours in "the river." After lying all night off the tiger-infested island of Saugur, we started on our run up to Calcutta before the sun was risen. Compared with Ceylon, the scene was English; there was nothing tropical about it except the mist upon the land; and low villas and distant factory chimneys reminded one of the Thames between Battersea and Fulham. Coming into Garden Reach, where large ships anchor before they sail, we had a long, low building on our right, gaudy and architecturally hideous, but from its vast size almost imposing: it was the palace of the dethroned King of Oude, the place where, it is said, are carried on deeds become impossible in Lucknow. Such has been the extravagance of the King that the Government of India has lately interfered, and appointed a commission to pay his debts, and deduct them from his income of £120,000 a year; for we pay into the privy purse of the dethroned Vizier of Oude exactly twice the yearly sum that we set aside for that of Queen Victoria. Whatever income is allowed to native princes, they always spend the double. The experience of the Dutch in Java and our own in India is uniform in this respect. Removed from that slight restraint upon expenditure which the fear of bankruptcy or revolution forces upon reigning kings, native princes supported by European Governments run recklessly into debt. The commission which was sitting upon the debts of the King of Oude while I was in Calcutta warned him that, if he offended a second time, Government would for the future spend his income for him. It is not the King's extravagance alone, however, that is complained of. Always notorious for debauchery, he has now become infamous for his vices. One of his wives was arrested while I was in Calcutta for purchasing girls for the harem, but the King himself escaped. For nine years he has never left his palace, yet he spends, we are told, from £200,000 to £250,000 a year.

(In his extravagance and immorality the King of Oude does not stand alone in Calcutta. His mode of life is imitated by the wealthy natives; his vices are mimicked by the young Bengalee baboo. It is a question whether we are not responsible for the tone which has been taken by "civilization" in Calcutta. The old philosophy has gone, and left nothing in its place; we have by moral force destroyed the old religions in Calcutta, but we have set up no new. Whether the character of our Indian Government, at once levelling and paternal, has not much to do with the spread of careless sensuality is a question before answering which it would be well to look to France, where a similar government has for sixteen years prevailed. In Paris, at least, democratic despotism is fast degrading the French citizen to the moral level of the Bengalee baboo.

The first thing in Calcutta that I saw was the view of the Government House from the Park Reserve -a miniature Sahara since its trees were destroyed by the great cyclone. The Viceroy's dwelling, though crushed by groups of lions and unicorns of gigantic stature and astonishing design, is an imposing building; but it is the only palace in the "city of palaces"—a name which must have been given to the pestiferous city by some one who had never seen any other towns but Liverpool and London. The true city of palaces is Lucknow.

In Calcutta, I first became acquainted with that unbounded hospitality of the great mercantile houses in the East of which I have since acquired many pleasing remembrances. The luxury of "the firm " impresses the English traveller; the huge house is kept as an hotel; every one is welcome to dinner, breakfast, and bed in the verandah, or in a room, if he can sleep under a roof in the hot weather. Sometimes two and sometimes twenty sit down to the meals, and always without notice to the butlers or the cooks, but every one is welcome, down to the friend of a friend's friend; and junior clerks will write letters of introduction to members of the firm, which secure the bearer a most hospitable welcome from the other clerks, even when all the partners are away. "If Brown is not there, Smith will be, and if he's away, why then Johnson will put you up," is the form of invitation to the hospitalities of an Eastern firm. The finest of fruits are on table between five

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