Gentlemen in other lands having the means and leisure of the higher classes of Hindoo society would be cultivating their minds, enlarging and enriching the literature of their times by their authorship, by foreign travel, by collections of books and works of art, and institutions for developing the resources of their great country. But there are no authors in India, no libraries in its homes; not one in a thousand of its aristocracy ever saw the outside of his native land. Learned societies, museums, or fruits of genius are not to be found there. Education, when acquired, is restricted mostly to the mere ability of reading and writing and talking in courtly style, while there are multitudes of wealthy men that cannot do that much; nay, there are even kings without the power to write their own names, who can give validity to State documents only by stamping them with “the signet on their right hand.” The sovereign of the Punjab—father of the Maharajah here represented—was one such. He was unable to write or read his own name, and to the day of his death could not tell one figure from another.
The little information of general news which they acquired from time to time had been obtained by a singular arrangement. Each great family, or king's court, had its “editor.” He was expected to furnish the news daily, or as often as he could. So he collected from any source within his reach, and got his newspaper ready. But he had no press, nor type, nor office, nor newsboy to aid him. He simply enters on his broad sheet, in writing, one after another, all the news or gossip he could collect, until his paragraphs fill his pages, and he sallies forth in the morning to circulate the news, commencing with the members of the household, and thence to the servants, and so on to the neighbors, reading for each circle the news he had previously collected and written out, and receiving his fees from each company as he goes round the neighborhood. Of express trains, telegraphs, associated press, pictorial papers, and all our Christian appliances for collecting and distributing the news of the wide world, he is utterly ignorant. But the poor editor is on a par with the education of his patrons, and he can rest
