a handful of aliens, ruling nearly 800,000,000 of people, most of them willing, indeed, to be ruled, and only asking to be protected in their peaceful pursuits, and to be left in undisturbed exercise of their religious and social customs inseparably connected in their minds. It need hardly be said that in such a vast conglomeration of people of such diverse races and tempers there must be here and there strata of unruly spirits who would gladly exchange the plough for the sword and peace for pillage and rapine.
In every province of India with which I am acquainted there is scattered about a considerable element of this kind—the vultures waiting for the death of their prey. In British India proper there are few large landowners or chiefs who, in case of any accidental paralysis of the paramount power, could hold in check the forces tending to anarchy even within a fractional area of one of our provinces. Hence, I would lay down the provision of an adequate British army as the first and indispensable condition to the maintenance of the dominion. Fifty years ago Lord Dalhousie wrote to the Board of Control: 'Our Raj is safe from risk only while we are strong. We have not, like the Colonies, anything to fall back upon. We must be strong, not against our enemy only, but against our own population, and even against possible contingencies connected with our native army.' Writing to Vernon Smith in 1855, the same Viceroy said: 'I have told you that India is tranquil, and you have repeated my words in Parliament. But I repeat also again and again what I have said before (and I would that I could cut it into the flesh of Her Majesty's Ministers), that India is tranquil only because, comparatively speaking, we are strong. Weaken us, and India will be neither tranquil nor secure.' Such a warning at the present day would, I am happy to say, seem uncalled for and superfluous, not because the proposition is less true, but because the Mutiny burnt Lord Dalhousie's words into the minds of all men. I doubt if there is any thoughtful man, much
