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the two civilisations sufficiently comparable to be classed together. A hundred years later no European would have dreamt of instituting such a comparison; the disparity between India and Europe by then had become so great that it would have been futile to speak of Murshadabad and Paris or Poona and London in the same breath. But in the seventeenth century, before Nadir Shah had sacked Delhi and before the Marathas had wasted the land, I doubt whether the the superiority of Europe was at all considerable. Bernier, it is true, is often quoted as an authority for the opposite opinion, but some of the shortcomings which he noted in the Moghul polity and in Indian manners were shortcomings from which even France, the most civilised country of Europe, had only recently emancipated herself. He pours, for instance, infinite contempt upon the Indian belief in astrology, and winds up a long tirade by the remark, "The ignorant and infatuated people really believe that the stars have an influence which the astrologers can control." I doubt very much whether the belief of these "ignorant and infatuated people" would have caused any surprise in Paris outside the cultivated circle in which Bernier moved. Voltaire tells us that everybody in France believed in astrologers at the beginning of the seventeenth century. "Even the austere Duc de Sulli records seriously the predictions which were made re

garding Henri IV., and such power had this superstition that care was taken to hide an astrologer close to the bedroom of the queen, Anne of Austria, when Louis XIV. was born. As Louis XIV. was born only twenty-five years before Bernier wrote his letter, it is difficult to believe that his contempt for astrology was very widely shared in France.

But it would not be fair to cite only those passages of Bernier in which he is guilty of partiality to his own compatriots. He gives us several interesting pictures of Court life at Delhi, and as he was an educated man and competent to weigh evidence, I would rather give credence to his report, short as was his stay in India, than to the gossip of Menucci, who retails the tittletattle of the bazaar with little discrimination. There is one passage in Bernier's letter to Le Vayer, which throws an unexpected light upon the Court of the Moghuls: it describes a scene which seems to belong rather to Paris than to Delhi.

"A whimsical kind of fair is sometimes held during these festivities in the Mehale, or royal Seraglio; it is conducted by the handsomest and most engaging of the wives of the Omrahs and Mansabdars [nobles and grandees]. The articles exhibited are beautiful brocades, rich embroideries of the newest fashion, turbans elegantly worked on cloth of gold, fine muslins worn by women of quality, and some other articles of high price. These bewitching females act

the part of traders, while the as well as the King buy

purchasers are the King, the Begums or Princesses, and other distinguished ladies of the Seraglio. If any Omrah's wife happens to have a handsome daughter, she never fails to accompany her mother that she may be seen by the King and become known to the Begums. The charm of the fair is the most ludicrous manner in which the King makes his bargains, frequently disputing for the value of a penny. He pretends that the good lady cannot possibly be in earnest, that the article is much too dear, that it is not equal to what he can find elsewhere, and that positively he will give no more than such a price. The woman on the other hand endeavours to sell to the best advantage, and when the King perseveres in offering what she considers too little money, high words frequently ensue, and she fearlessly tells him that he is a worthless trader (un marchand de neige), & person ignorant of the value of merhandise; that her articles are too good for him, and that he had better go where he can suit himself better, and similar jooular expressions. The Begums betray, if possible, a still greater anxiety to be served cheaply; high words are heard on every side, and the loud and scurrilous quarrels of the sellers and buyers create a complete farce. But, sooner or later they agree upon the price; the Princesses

right and left, pay in ready money, and often slip out of their hands, as if by accident, a few gold instead of silver roupies, intended as a compliment to the fair merchant or her pretty daughter. The present is received in the same unconscious manner, and the whole ends amidst witty jests and good-humour."1

It is probable that Moghul civilisation was always something of an exotic in India; the Court talked Persian, a foreign language, and was continually recruited by fresh arrivals from Central Asia; it is at least doubtful whether its culture materially influenced the people of the country. But had Indian history followed the orderly evolution of progress in Europe, it might in time have widened down and become truly national. But this was not to be. After the death of Aurangzib in 1707, the great edifice of Moghul government tottered to its fall, and the realm upreared by Akbar and Shah Jehan "reeled back into the beast and was no more." There is in all history no more pitiful reading than the tale of the Great Anarchy in which India weltered during the eighteenth century. Afghan freebooters descended from the north and burned and harried the country; Marathas pillaged and levied blackmail, leaving behind them a blackened waste where villages and crops had stood; they spread such terror over India that the

1 Travels in the Mogul Empire,' by Francois Bernier. P. 273. London : Constable & Co.

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mothers in Bengal stayed the crying of their children by saying, Hush the Marathas are coming." What the larger armies left was destroyed by gangs of brigands and marauders. Unable to make a living by honest work, every man with a stout heart took to the trade of arms. Whole tribes who would have been content enough to till their ancestral fields, had they been left unmolested, took to freebooting and roamed over India as companies of Free Lances. The land went out of cultivation, the country was depopulated, and wild beasts multiplied in the untilled waste. Civilisation went back with frightful rapidity. Nor is this surprising. We know how the Thirty Years' War put back civilisation in Germany, and that it took her two hundred years to regain the place in Europe from which that comparatively short spell of anarchy precipitated her. "The very pattern of the chairs on which the peasant sat," says Dr Gardiner, "of the vessels out of which he ate and drank, assumed a ruder appearance than they had

In all

borne before the war. ranks life was meaner, poorer, harder than it had been at the beginning of the century." If such was the effect of the Thirty Years' War on Germany, is it surprising that confusion prolonged to almost thrice that length wellnigh annihilated the civilisation of India! At the opening of the nineteenth century India lay in the insensibility of exhaustion, and the first task of the new Government was to nurse her back to life and then carry onward the civilising work of the Moghuls. To realise the progress which

India achieved in the nineteenth century we must not measure her upward march from the height which she had reached under Shahjehan or Aurangzib, but from the depth to which she had fallen during the Great Anarchy. The progress she has made since that calamitous epoch is, in my opinion, the most marvellous thing that has happened in Asia in the last hundred years: no wonder that when her King Rode to Delhi at the end of last year he gave to India a message of hope.

AN IMPRESSIONIST VIEW OF CANADA.

FIRST impressions are certainly open to the charge of being superficial. They must necessarily be so. But, all the same, they give us something that we shall never see again. The contrasts with our former experiences are more marked. Essential features, which familiarity will subsequently blur, catch our attention more forcibly, just as the idiosyncrasies of a new acquaintance leave an impress which will not return after years of intimacy. And if they fail to penetrate below the surface, they should also be free from prejudice. Longer study forces us to take sides in outstanding controversies; it immerses us strong sympathies and antipathies. Human nature prevents us from preserving for long an attitude of impartiality.

In the case of the Dominion of Canada, if the superficial view is open to mistakes, it is also free from the burden of responsibility. We may do our best to form a conception of a nation in the making, without having to take a part in its development. It is not ours to solve its problems or to direct its destinies. That has passed beyond our power. It is not

for us to measure its independence, to prescribe its constitution, or to guide its footsteps in the path of expansion. We can only watch, and do our best to harmonise our action with its progress, and to adjust

our relations with these cousins overseas.

The first lesson comes to us long before we reach the shores of the St Lawrence. The ship that carried us across the Atlantic carried also some thousand emigrants, who were to make their home in Canada; and no great discrimination was required to enable any one to judge their quality. The loafer and the street-corner man were conspicuous by their absence. The citizens to be enrolled in the new nation were, in the main, sound specimens of British manhood. England and Scotland may be richer in the future for the strength of our kinsmen beyond the seas, but for the present they are spending of their best to help to build up that strength. We were assured that our fellow-passengers, who were going to Canada to stay, were but an ordinary average specimen of the weekly contingent that leaves our shores. One hears often in Canada of the wastrel who arrives there under the delusion that the weakling who has failed in the old country may find a place in the more strenuous life across the Atlantic. That sort do little credit to the old country, and a sorry fate awaits them in the new. But we can only

say that there was little evidence of their presence in the contingent that sailed with us.

Many approach Canada by the quicker passage to Boston

or New York, and then through the States. For ourselves, we hold that the longer route by the St Lawrence serves as a more dramatic introduction to the Dominion. We scarcely regretted even the delay of thirty hours, due to dense fog, when it was compensated by the superb view of a countless fleet of icebergs, numerous beyond any recent experience,

an array which would have spelt disaster had there been any rashness of navigation, but which, when the fog cleared, and they shone out in brilliant sunlight, fully paid us for the dreary hours, broken only by the wail of the syren. The passage through Belle Isle Straits, with the Labrador coast, recalling memories of Shetland, forms a fitting portal to the vast stretches of lonely forest which succeed it; and the

voyage up the St Lawrence is an experience which it would be hard to match. It attunes the mind to that sense of largeness which gradually penetrates one's consciousness, and is perhaps the most enduring impression left, after we have journeyed through Canada from

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opportunity of welcoming a stranger and making that stranger feel at home. We have only to see, as an absolute outsider, a very little of the vast stream of enterprise, to be struck by the same sense of expansion in action which has already captured our eye in the landscape. In a small and unpretentious room we find the central machinery which is controlling vast commercial undertakings, stretching from New Brunswick to Vancouver; regulating the financial supply which is to give motive power; directing enterprise into new channels, and accurately gauging the forces that sway the varying tides of trade over an immeasurable field. Politics are here a subsidiary interest. A nation is growing before our eyes. No party shibboleths can here exercise a dominating influence. The national life is moving forward in a mighty current, and no political prejudice can be allowed to stay its progress.

But this does not mean that men are deaf to political appeals or indifferent to political ideals. Their very welcome tells us of the feeling of brotherhood, and reflects the passionate conviction that our interests and theirs are indissolubly united. It is easy to perceive how deep is the impression of the victory at the polls of last September, when disaster was turned aside, and when the specious policy that we now know - as we before suspected-was to lead to annexation to the United States, was finally crushed. In that victory, and in the 3 A

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