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Rh past this stretch of Chowringee Road, and the Maidan before the museum, even more than through the labyrinthine bazaars, one is appalled and oppressed with the realization of India's population—294,360,356. All day the lean, wistful, apathetic men stream up and down, up and down, going nowhere, doing nothing—hundreds passing at any moment, thousands in an hour, with no women and rarely a child in sight. Each Hindu, in his dirty head-sheet, represents a family crowded back somewhere in the city slums or in mud villages beyond. One easily believes the census figures, and sees how the frightful problem of over-population besets the empire; how necessary, almost, are plague and famine, in lieu of wars, to reduce the swarms and herds of these lank, inert, torpid, half-fed, half-clothed, half-alive Bengalis, When the sixty million Bengalis are crowded seven hundred and even nine hundred to the square mile of this fertile province, and are the most prolific of Indian races, they must reap three harvests a year even to half live, as they do. Long-continued peace and the sanitary blessings of English rule have so preserved and increased human life that disease and starvation seem too slow agents to accomplish the necessary reduction. Only tidal waves and earthquakes, annual disasters like those of Pompeii and Martinique, could keep the population within bounds.

The Hindus are not a laughing, light-hearted, joyous people, and the Bengali is the most melancholy of them. He has little, almost no sense of humor, his voice is always in a sad minor key when not