Page:How People May Live and not Die in India.pdf/13

 of replacing the men cut off by excess of premature and preventible mortality.

1. Unofficial people are everywhere asking the question, how this great death-rate has arisen—how it happens that one of the most civilised and healthy nations in the world no sooner lands the pick of its working population in tropical climates (for similar losses occur in all tropical climates among us) than they begin to die off at this enormous rate.

I am afraid the reply must be, that British civilisation is insular and local, and that it takes small account of how the world goes on out of its own island. There is a certain aptitude amongst other nations which enables them to adapt themselves, more or less, to foreign climates and countries. But, wherever you place your Briton, you may feel quite satisfied that he will care nothing about climates.

If he has been a large eater and a hard drinker at home—ten to one he will be, to say the least of it, as large an eater and as hard a drinker in the burning plains of Hindostan. Enlist an Irish or a Scotch labourer who has done many a hard day's work, almost entirely on farinaceous or vegetable diet, with an occasional dose of whiskey,—place him at some Indian station where the thermometer ranges at between 90° and 100°, and he will make no difficulty in disposing of three or four times the quantity of animal food he ever ate under the hardest labour during winters at home—if, indeed, he ever ate any at all.