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combined action against Austria. His policy always was—as he expressed it already, when in exile-to beat the members of the former Holy Alliance' one after the other, by making alternately use of one against the other. In the end, England herself was to be humiliated.

Garibaldi listened to Rattazzi's proposals, but keeping his own counsel. When he became fully alive to the extent of the Bonapartist and Rattazzian plot, he drew the sword, in order to strike right across. In his proclamation of August 24, he said :-

I bow before the Majesty of Victor Emmanuel, King elect of the nation, but I am hostile to a Ministry which has nothing Italian but the name, and which only strives to keep in the good graces of the Emperor Napoleon. . . . The livery of a foreign master shall never be a title of honour and esteem for any minister of ours. . . . Let the thought and action of all patriots be exclusively directed to the freeing of Rome. To Rome, then! To Rome! Hail to King Victor Emmanuel at the Capitol !

The key of this manifesto is contained in the above communication. When not a few deserted him, to whom he had formerly been like an idol, I thought it all the more a duty, in the name of German friends, to send him an address of sympathy in October, 1862. He was then a wounded captive, and the daily mark of vituperation. The English working classes steadfastly stood to him. But hideous sanguinary riots and brutal atrocities were enacted for three consecutive weeks in Hyde Park, by a bigoted Irish mob which attacked the English meetings with the cry of No Garibaldi! The Pope

for ever!'

The following were the chief passages of the German Address :

There are defeats which carry with them the germs of future triumphs. In uplifting the hand courageously against a usurpation that gnaws at the heart of your country; in raising the cry of Rome or Death!' you have given timely warning to a nation that was in danger of becoming the prey of a vampire policy; and you have foiled, at least for a time, those nefarious despotic projects into which Italy was being drawn. Yet, in spite of the reverse which has interrupted your work of emancipation, yours has been a great service to the cause of progress. On the day when Italy shall enter into possession of her capital, your name will be inserted on the tablets of history as that of the true victor. . . . Allow me, my dear friend, to offer you also cordial greetings in the name of numerous German friends. . . . The ingratitude of a king will not weigh keenly on your heart in presence of the large popular sympathies. . . . Kings pass away; but nations remain; and to the nations that seek to establish the truly Free State, the future belongs with certainty.

...

When Garibaldi came to England, I again held it to be a duty, as chairman of the German meeting of April 5, to say before our countrymen -- Even his defeat at Aspromonte has covered him with imperishable glory. I know that that bold move, though it has not succeeded in freeing the Italian capital from foreign dominion, yet has had most certainly this success, that it struck across a dark No. 632 (NO CLII. N. s.)

T

despotic plot which then was being spun against Germany. Yes, we Germans, before all, may thank Garibaldi for having averted by his Roman expedition, unsuccessful though it was, a danger which was nearing the Rhine. At least, we may thank him for having staved off that danger for a while. (Deep movement and applause.) It is for us now to show sympathy to Italy. Ay, Venice is an Italian Schleswig-Holstein. When our own frontiers have to be guarded, we shall all stand shoulder to shoulder. But Venice is nothing more than a possession of the House of Habsburg; it does not form part of the territory of the German nation.'s

Only four years elapsed when the danger which had been averted by the campaign that failed at Aspromonte again threatened Germany for a moment, through the Luxemburg complication (1868). Two years more passed, and the storm at last broke forth, involving a tremendous catastrophe.

8 London Hermann: April 9, 1864.

(To be concluded.)

KARL BLIND.

TH

AN INDIAN ROMANCE-AND THE REALITY.1

HE willingness of the English people to believe the best about India was never more strikingly exemplified than in the reception given to this book. Nearly two years before its publication one of its authors had been guilty of one of the worst pieces of budgetmaking that has ever disgraced an English administrator. That extraordinary budget lies before me now, and, read in the light of facts that must then have been known to all high-placed Indian officials, except Sir John Strachey-facts that came to light within a few days of its publication-it is a most astounding production. As one reads its glaringly false estimate of the cost of the Afghan war, its balderdash about Indian self-respect and self-reliance' being wounded or compromised by English help to pay for that war, and contrasts the false picture thus presented with the true, one can hardly believe it possible that any human being could ever give heed to a single word uttered about India by this soaring rhetorician again. He becomes maudlinly eloquent about the number and character of the Indian population,' about India's 'military strength and the capabilities of her public revenue and credit,' declaring that they prove her to be one of the great powers of the world, ready at all times to stand side by side with England, to fulfil every obligation which she owes to the common interest.' Occupying such a position she indignantly repels-in Sir John's person-all suggestion of poverty; she took a loan of 2,000,000l. without interest from England with reluctance. There is no more reason,' says this doughty champion of Indian financial independence, 'that England should help us to pay for a local war, necessary for the protection of the interests of India, than that she should help us in the relief of our famines, or in meeting the ordinary charges of our administration.'2

This is the man, then, who with his brother, Lieutenant-General R. Strachey-the 'public works' man-undertook in this volume to guide the English people to a true knowledge of Indian affairs. And the eager English people has, strange to say, accepted the guidance. It was beginning to grow alarmed about India because so many people had declared it to be so poverty-stricken as to threaten a dissolution of our Empire from sheer exhaustion; because English statesmen have one and all fallen into the habit of shrieking in fright if a Russian dog so much as barks with his nose turned to-

The Finances and Public Works of India from 1819 to 1881. By Sir John Strachey, G.C.S.I., and Lieutenant-General Richard Strachey, R.E., F.R.S. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co.

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Away then

wards the Indian frontier, or if a ragged Bedouin appears on the bank of the Suez Canal. But here were two highly-placed Indian officials ready to swear that all was well; here was an ex-finance minister able to show that famine was, if not a mark of prosperity, at least a necessary means to a noble end-the end of increased taxation and greater expenditure on public works.' What if one of these men had framed Indian budgets worthy of a farceur of the last French Empire. He could talk of a 'prosperous' India, grow eloquent about expanding revenues, free trade, the glories of the opium traffic, and the sweet simplicity of the salt tax. The English public wanted a comfortable doctrine, and here it was. with all thoughts of the hunger of the Indian people. Banish the sight of that miserable thirteen hundred thousand 3 who died in the North-west Provinces in 1877-78, because Lord Lytton needed the 'famine fund' for his Afghan war; we should never have heard of that terrible crime but for Colonel Osborn, and what is he against men like the Stracheys? what he and the dead together? Away then with all disquieting thoughts. Blot out the sight of the people of Madras, of Berar, of Orissa, nay, of all India, living always 'on the border land of starvation.' Think of India as a great power;' forget the costly English contingent reducible at our peril; forget Scindia and Holkar with their trained legions, watching their chances like panthers in the jungle; forget disaffected Mahommedan Hyderabad, charged with the elements of disorder and smarting under its many wrongs; sullen Bengal waiting to see whether any English administrator will have the hardihood to follow Sir J. Strachey's advice, and break through the permanent land settlement in order to reduce Bengal landowners also to the miserable position of those of Oudh and the North-west Provinces. Blot out all these things and consider all Mahommedans dead. What are they all before this gorgeous array of tropes and rhetorical tinsel, this deluge of calculations, and these airy structures of ideal finance. Take comfort in the thought the Indian 'credit' is improving on the London market in spite of that steadiness with which the Indian Exchange points towards bankruptcy, that famines rather improve the situation by clearing off the surplus population which our humane administration permits to grow up in too great numbers, that the debt is growing smaller in weight in spite of the new millions borrowed every year, and that all public works,' whether they be canals that salt the soil, or abandoned railways, or barracks that need to be built three times over before they consent to stand are a distinct boon to the Indian people.

There is something so touching in this faith that one positively envies it. If one could only forget facts, as the writers of this book have done, if the five or six millions that have died of hunger in so many years could be thought of as so many crows, if the subterfuges

Sir J. Caird's estimate.

of a bad cause would not obtrude themselves on the mind's eye so constantly, faith might be possible. But it is impossible. The more facts are looked at, the more even that one studies this remarkable book of the Stracheys, the more alarming does the outlook become. In truth, they overdo their part, the picture they paint is too shadowless; an India, rich, prosperous, and progressive as they picture it to be, would turn her alien rulers adrift in a year.

To deal with all the misleading statements of this book would require a volume at least as large as itself, and I have only the space of a magazine article. It will be necessary, therefore, to confine the reader's attention as much as possible to the broad lines of divergence between the authors of this book, and those who, like myself, consider Indian questions from a different stand-point. Perhaps nothing will so clearly differentiate the position I occupy from that taken up by the Stracheys as this one consideration. They and all Indian apologists write of things Indian from the stand-point of the English bureaucrat in India. Their object is to demonstrate that everything the Englishman does or says in that country is good; that the revenues he administers are flourishing; that the railways he has built yield every year increased dividends; that his canals are miracles in their capacity to help the cultivator; that famines, though in themselves not nice, of course, do not interfere with the collection of the land tax-cannot on principle be allowed to do so; or that official India can borrow as easily as England or France. Having proved all these things to their own satisfaction and to the admiration of the gaping crowd, which is always ready to take noisy men at their own valuation, they consider their task at an end, all foes silenced and put to rout. Now to all this I would answer: These things may be very true, but they are nothing to the point. What we want to know is, how the natives fare under all this tremendous progress and officially manufactured prosperity. The Stracheys in short, and men of that official set, present only the outside of the sepulchre to view. I would go inside and see with what it is filled. There is an official India where all is well, an India serenely indifferent to the toiling India, seemingly unconscious of the explosives that may be slowly manufacturing beneath its feet; and there is an India composed of nearly two hundred millions of toiling and suffering people. What of these? The Strachey order of mind does not know; has not thought it worth while to look at that question.

But suppose we accept all this prosperity as something real, there is still this other general consideration to be advanced. It is a prosperity wholly manufactured from above. Every public work, every new branch of manufacture, every 'improvement,' no matter what, is as much superimposed upon the Indian people as our godlike administration itself. It is, therefore, something for which these native people have to pay. The Englishman, not the Indian native, draws the interest and dividends paid upon the railway capital, just as he does that upon the general war-created debt, or public works 'repro