Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/478

418 “The daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in the garden of cucumbers."

It is a most remarkable fact, that while other countries have the whole face of society changed by conquest and subjection to rulers from foreign lands, India—though swept over by successive hordes of invaders, though plundered and divided among contending despots, though transferred from hand to hand, as each dynasty was crushed by one more powerful than itself—has, to a great extent, remained unchanged. India now is, in its habits, feelings, and pursuits, very much what it was three thousand years ago. The Hindu of the nineteenth century lives and labours, plants, ploughs, weaves, and reaps as did his fathers at the Christian era, when savages roved and chased the deer in the woods of ancient Britain.

This fact is to be attributed more perhaps to the organization of the village government of India than to any other circumstance. Each town, with the adjacent lands, is, to a great extent, an independent community, having its own rulers, its own agriculturalists, its own police, and its own artisans. Though subject to the general government, its affairs are managed