car by the frenzied crowd of fanatics--and enforce the law which now
forbids the poor insane devotees from casting themselves beneath
the fatal wheels, still, it cannot be denied that the devotees are
_there_, nor that Jaghernâth is still the Mecca of millions of debased
worshipers. It is also true that the pretended exhibitions of the
tooth of Buddha can still inspire an ignorant multitude of people to
place themselves in adoring procession and to debase themselves with
the absurd rites of frenzy and unreason. Nor do I forget the fact that
my countrymen are broken up into hundreds of sects, and their language
frittered into hundreds of dialects. Yet, as I said, we are full of
hope, and there can be no man so bold as to limit the capabilities of
that blood which flows in English veins as well as in Hindu. Somehow
or other, India is now not so gloomy a topic to read of or to talk
of as it used to be. The recent investigations of Indian religion and
philosophy have set many European minds upon trains of thought which
are full of novelty and of promise. India is not the only land--you
who are from America know it full well--where the current orthodoxy
has become wholly unsatisfactory to many of the soberest and most
practically earnest men; and I please myself with believing that it is
now not wholly extravagant to speak of a time when these two hundred
millions of industrious, patient, mild-hearted, yet mistaken Hindus
may be found leaping joyfully forward out of their old shackles toward
the larger purposes which reveal themselves in the light of progress."

At the close of our conversation, which was long and to me intensely
interesting, the babou informed us that he had recently become
interested with a company of Englishmen in reclaiming one of the
numerous and hitherto wholly unused islands in the Sunderbunds for the
purpose of devoting it to the culture of rice and sugar-cane, and
that if we cared to penetrate some of the wildest and most picturesque