the decrease in the native states being many times greater than in the British provinces. Increased areas of irrigation and cultivation have made it possible for the increasing millions to live—to half live, according to European standards, for the Indian coolie or agricultural worker is lowest in the scale of living and wages and in standard of comfort of any Asiatic. Great calamities and scourges afford the only relief from over-population,—a population in which the women are in deficit to the number of six millions, and their illiteracy so great that only one woman in one hundred and sixty can read.
All these diverse races and peoples are picturesque to look upon, with their graceful draperies of brilliant colors and the myriad forms of turbans; but they are not an attractive, a winning, a sympathetic, or a lovable people. They are as antipathetic and devoid of charm as the Chinese, as callous, as deficient in sympathy and the sense of pity as those next neighbors of theirs in Asia, and as impossible for the Occidental to fathom or comprehend,—an irresistible, inexplicable, unintelligible repulsion controlling one. India vexes one sadly because of the irrational, illogical turns of the Indian mind and character, the strange impasses in the Indian brain, the contradictions of traits; and, because of the many things he cannot account for or reach solution of, he quits the country baffled and in irritation—forever the great gulf yawning between the Occidental and the Asiatic. "East is East, and West is West."
Not one of the innumerable tongues that he hears spoken by the common people in the bazaars falls
