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xiv —five times as many Hindus as Mohammedans, and one hundred and nine times as many natives as English. The fourteen distinct races follow eight forms of religious belief, and speak some two hundred and forty languages and three hundred dialects; all legislative acts are published in English, Persian, Bengali, and Hindustani—and then only one man in ten can read. The permanence of British rule and the safety of British interests lie in this diversity of race, language, government, and religion. In division is strength, in discord is stability, since their race hatreds, jealousies, animosities, and antipathies would never permit a native leader to be acceptable to all the native malcontents, and patriotism or any national spirit is as lacking as the sense of those words, and of even the word for gratitude. With no common language or religion, no national feeling, in this congress of nations, one may paraphrase a certain interrogative and exclaim: "The Indians! Who are they?"

One fifth of the human race dwells between the Himalayas and the ocean; the records of their civilization go back for three thousand years, and history has been written upon history on those plains. Rice—two hundred and ninety-five kinds of rice, called by as many names in as many tongues—and pulse are the staple food of this great agricultural people, drought and famine the lot of some state or province each year, with plague and cholera seldom absent. Two great famines and the continual ravages of the bubonic pest greatly reduced the population during the last decade of the past century,