Page:Imperial India — An Artist's Journals.djvu/25

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INTRODUCTORY.
7

Englishman, and has tended to develop our nation into what we are. Neither am I myself without the taste for slaying, as I know from the reluctance I experienced in having to refuse more than one invitation to join in pleasant sporting excursions. But India has many objects of more interest to the rational Englishman than its tigers, bears, and pigs : while Italy, Spain, Egypt, Syria, and even distant Babylon and Bagdad, have attractions for intelligent tourists, it seems hard that India should remain unvisited. Not that I should wish our Eastern empire to be overrun with Mr. Cook's scamperers, whose only object seems to be to say that they have been in a place; but I would wish the natives to see some of our great nation who are not on the look-out for profitable investments, or separated from ordinary mortals by the brand of officialism. Such intelligent travellers would do more to create a kindly feeling between natives and their rulers than any Minutes of Council or Acts of the Legislature.