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500 OUDH. BY 5000. The total population of these 55 towns in 1881 aggregated 770,540, or 67 per cent of the population of the Province. Twentynine towns, with an aggregate of 626,938 inhabitants, have been constituted municipalities. Total municipal income (1883-84), £50,871, of which £37,691 was derived from taxation, principally octroi duties; average incidence of taxation, IS. 2 d. per head. Of the entire number of towns and villages (24,337) in Oudh, the Census of 1881 makes the following classification :-Containing less than two hundred inhabitants, 8114; with from two to five hundred, 9119; from five hundred to one thousand, 4982 ; from one to two thousand, 1694; from two to three thousand, 263; from three to five thousand, III; from five to ten thousand, 36; from ten to fifteen thousand, 13; from fifteen to twenty thousand, 3 ; from twenty to fifty thousand, 1; and over fifty thousand, 1. Of the larger towns, only one, Tánda, owes its prosperity to manufactures, and even this prosperity has rapidly sunk before the competition of English textile fabrics, Bahraich, Sháhábád, Khairábád, Sandila, Rudauli, Bilgrám, Jáis, Sándi, and Zaidpur were originally military colonies of the Muhammadans, and now share the decay of the Musalmán power. Balrampur, Gonda, Láharpur, Purwá, and Mallánwán trace their origin to little centres where grain merchants and money. dealers collected round the protecting fort of a Hindu chieftain. And Faizabad and Lucknow sprang up about the courts of the Nawab Wazirs, who selected them for their residence. But the population of the country is essentially rural, spread over its whole surface in small cultirating communities. The Census of 1869 returned the number of separate hamlets at above 77,000, and the average number of inhabitants in each at only 150. The Census of 1881 followed a different classification in returning the number of villages in Oudh at 24,272, excluding towns. The village here meant may include two or more hamlets, and corresponds rather to the term parish used in England. In this sense each parish in Oudh contains about 437 inhabitants. The people are nowhere drawn together by the complex wants of our European civilisation. A few huts, clustering close to one another in the immediate neighbourhood of most of the fields, form the real unit of society. Small centres of trade, where the simple wants of the villagers may be supplied, occur at distances of 2 or 3 miles, and consist of a few mud cottages, together with the tiled and two-storied house of the grain merchant and money-lender. In their dwellings, as in their clothes and food, the wants of the people are very modest. Out of a total in 1869 of 2,610,000 houses, only 19,400 were of brick. Most of the latter were erected by Muhammadan settlers in the days of their prosperity. The Hindu chieftain fortified himself in an enclosure surrounded by a moat, and defended by a thick belt of prickly shrubbery; and though our peaceful rule has made the fort an anachronism, the