for each of the Presidencies) have been recommended by the Royal Commission, together with a Home Commission to help these Departments in bringing the appliances of a better civilisation to India.
The work is urgent. Every day it is left undone adds its quota of inefficiency to the British Army, and its thousands of deaths to the native population. Danger is common to European and to native. Many of the best men this country ever had have fallen victims to the same causes of disease which have decimated the population of Hindostan. And so it will be till the India Government has fulfilled its vast responsibility towards those great multitudes who are no longer strangers and foreigners, but as much the subjects of our beloved Queen as any one of us.
The real, the main point in the Report of the Royal Commission is this:
Look to the state of your stations first—then look to the hills for help. Your stations and cities are in a condition which, in the finest temperate climate in Europe, would be—have been—the cause of the Great Plague—of half the population being swept off by disease. And on the other hand, no climate in the world, certainly not that of India, could kill us, if we did not kill ourselves by our neglects. We complain of the climate, when the wonder is that there is one of us left, under a sky which certainly intensifies causes of disease—so much so
