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other distant districts. It is true that the wants developed 

 are not always of a wholesome kind, and this is generally the 

 case when means increase faster than education and taste 

 for rational modes of enjoyment. But the first condition 

 necessary for progress is the increase of wants and when 

 once the desire for improvement is excited, the wants can 

 be regulated by education. For instance when in the sixties, 

 owing to the cotton famine in England and other causes, 

 the ryots in several districts realized large profits, they in- 

 creased their style of living and spent large sums of money 

 on marriages and festivals. When prices fell, however, they 

 had to cut down expenditure on purposes of mere show, 

 retaining what was necessary for substantial comforts. It is 

 doubtless true that in European countries the evils of the 

 industrial regime in the form of undue concentration of wealth 

 making " the rich grow richer and the poor poorer " and of 

 the exploitation of labour by capital have been forcing them- 

 selves on public attention, but in this country the conditions are 

 altogether different. Though the old regime of status is now 

 being replaced by a regime of competition, the transition has 

 been rendered gradual and easy by the tenderness shown to the 

 rights and interests of the lowest classes under the influence 

 of the humanitarian sentiment which is the characteristic 

 feature of the nineteenth century and to which the essentially 

 just and beneficent policy of the British Government in India 

 owes its origin. As we have already seen, the tendency till 

 now in this country has been towards not so much undue 

 concentration of wealth as its diffusion exhibiting itself in 

 the gfradual formation of a middle class between the small 

 class of persons who were once immensely rich and who find 

 their hereditary influence and wealth fail them when not 

 supported by individual worth and personal exertions, and 

 the great mass of the population which has always been in a 

 state of great poverty ; and owing to this, while perhaps the 

 increase of wealth may go on at a slower rate, it may be that 

 we shall never have to feel the evils of unequal distribution 

 of wealth in the acute form in which they have appeared in 

 European countries. 



Bearing, then, these considerations in mind and remem- 

 bering that methods of progi'ess calculated to evoke national 

 feeling and religious enthusiasm are unavailable under the 

 conditions of the case, the progress that has been made under 

 the new regime during the short time that it has been in force 

 — fifty years is a brief interval in the life of a people — 

 is little short of marvellous. Some of the evils \^hich have 

 appeared and the remedies for them we have already noted, 



