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186 Let us attend to what Professor Ronald Ross, who went out to India to discover the true cause of malaria, thinks of its civilisation from a medical point of view. "Racked by poverty, swept by epidemics, housed in hovels, ruled by superstitions, they presented the spectacle of an ancient civilisation fallen for centuries into decay. One saw there both physical and mental degeneration. Since the time of the early mathematicians, science had died; and since that of the great temples, art had become ornament. Here was the living picture of the fate which destroyed Greece, Rome, and Spain; and I saw in it the work of nescience the opposite of science."

And the representative of the Indian government, speaking in the House of Commons, in July, 1911, practically confirms all this. "The present standard of living," he says, "is deplorably low. Ignorance of sanitary or medical principles is practically universal." The death-rate of children is appalling. The general death-rate is also immensely high. "Plague has now been present in India for fifteen years, and the total of nearly 7,500,000 deaths from it has been recorded."

Thus an aspect of our Asiatic future rises before us. The Indian peoples, as we found them, were almost extinct politically, and we have provided them with a polity. Further, they lacked prosperity, and we claimed to furnish it. At first sight, it seemed that we had succeeded, with our public works, and our law and order, and our