the third-class carriage which pays the best,—showing how the lowest orders have learned the benefits of locomotion.
In the estimates for the coming year’s expenditure, nine millions and upwards are set down for outlay on public works (including railway guarantees). These works being reproductive in the highest degree, they will soon pay for themselves; and then there will be less taxation, while the revenue increases in all its branches:—in other words, there will be a new start in the popular fortunes, which need receive no check while there is any part of that vast country unreached and undeveloped. Every new work brings out some new element of wealth,—as we see now in the new value of forests, wastes, and soils which nobody thought of using before. Thus, there really seems to be wealth enough coming to light and to use to make the fortunes of not only all Hindoos, but a great many Englishmen.
There is something better than this, however. The fearful superstition of these people has been the dead weight, the discouragement, the despair, ever since we had to do with them. I need not explain why missionary effort is scarcely any relief to any rational mind. We probably all see why missionary effort has really no chance against such a system as that of the Hindoos. But we begin to see how the Hindoo system must undergo change under the operation of so rapid an influx of civilisation as the priests have now to witness. Well might the Brahmins hold that consultation a few years since, which seemed to me at the time so profoundly significant,—about how far the merit of pilgrimages is affected by the introduction of railroads. Every monstrous observance and requisition of their idolatrous system will in due course be overthrown or dislocated by new knowledge and new arts, as the painful pilgrimage in heat, hardship, and hunger, is inoffensively made absurd by the present fact of a railway and its trains.
The education of girls is perhaps the most portentous fact of all. The whole training of children will be changed, from the next generation onwards, wherever the bold step is adventured.
I might go on for page after page, comparing the Hindoo life of to-day with that of all former ages known to us: but I may stop here; for the importance of the view is in the strength of the contrast, and not in the number of the particulars in which it may be traced. The first step has been taken in the direction of native participation in the government. If this goes on till there is some sort of real union between the two races who are living under the same crown, the woes of India are over. There is much to do yet, before we can confidently anticipate such an issue: but much has been actually effected, even towards that great end, by the extinction of the rivalries and wars of barbaric governments, by the proposal of equal law and justice for all orders of the people, and by the complete throwing open of industry and enterprise to the ability and inclination of the whole multitude of the inhabitants of India.
Surely, now, no Hindoo, but some Nana Sahib, sulking in the frontier forests, or some fanatical priest looking down from his temple aloft on the busy world below, will say that for India “the former days were better than these.”
BRETONS AND BRITONS.
Alike in origin, for they share the blood of the earliest recorded inhabitants of our land; alike in ancient tongue, for the “Vrai Bretagne Brettonnante,” as Froissart calls it, is allied to our Welsh and Cornish; alike in name to the present day, these distant cousins live upon the same sea, but almost in another world. Perhaps no Europeans are more unlike each other than they. They differ more widely than plain French and English, for the Breton exhibits in caricature those habits and customs which mark the contrast most strongly between our neighbours and ourselves. He is far more bigoted, dirty, and ignorant than the average of his countrymen.
During a recent visit to Brittany I noted down on a sheet of paper some of those peculiarities which always strike John Bull most; and now, on looking over my list, I find it so long that I am tempted to serve it up in such a shape as may give information to some, and perhaps recall a few pleasant whiffs of continental recollections to those who are acquainted with France. Of course, in using the materials which are before me, some will be found—indeed, I see already that they are—common to the whole country. Perhaps not many are really peculiar to Brittany, but they struck me as being exaggerated in that province. For instance, I think that the Breton breakfast-cups are heavier and have thicker lips than those anywhere else—a sip from one is a mouthful; their dinner-plates are colder and congeal the gravy quicker than others; their carriages are dustier and more tinkered; their mixture of meats is more surprising to an English stomach than any in Gaul. The other day we had for breakfast, at a good inn, these principal viands: tripe, raw artichokes, and cider—not that there were no other dishes, the meal was abundant and good, but these were more distinctly and unhesitatingly consumed, along with slices from huge coarse country loaves—no petit pain, or crisp white rolls, so sweet and common in Paris. Yet we were in a good hotel, at Dinan, a town which contains 8500 inhabitants, and is much visited in the summer. It is a striking place, with rain-worn granite walls and towers which redden in the sunset over rows of green young trees; dark little gateways which look quite impassable to the lumbering diligence, with its three straggling white horses abreast, and luggage like a load of hay; quaint old houses which have been peeping round corners and nodding their heads at one another across the street any time these last three hundred years; houses with projecting first-floors standing on stone pillars; streets, narrow, tortuous, interlacing, paved up to the walls with cruel stones, and each with a trickling black drain in the middle, where the ducks rummage; shops which nobody seems to enter, with small windows of bad glass—blue cotton, wood, and tobacco being the commonest