24. Annual Address. [JFeb. 



first authority of the day on Polar geography got up to criticise some 

 of the lecturer's conclusions on matters less attractive than female 

 attire he was received with manifest signs of boredom and disapproval. 



Yet when we have said, "Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo," is 

 that quite the last word ? I hardly think so, and that is why I have 

 taken our position as a Society for the subject of this brief address. We 

 shall all admit, when we have relieved our minds by a gibe at the 

 Philistine in the street, that the authority and influence of the Society 

 are not what they were a century ago. We do not do so much, and 

 what we do does not attract so much general attention as it did. Those 

 are the facts, there is no disputing them, but it seems worth while to 

 make an attempt to discover their causes. 



The standard explanation, a stock excuse for many things in India, 

 is want of leisure. Everyone is said to be too busy. The demands of 

 official work, of business, of society are heavier than they were in the 

 old days. People had time then to read and to think ; they have no 

 time now. That line of apology I would sweep aside as emphatically 

 as His Excellency the Patron did five years ago, at the first meeting of 

 the Society which he honoured with his presence. As crucial illustra- 

 tions of its futility, I would appeal not only to the example of the 

 Patron himself, who manages to find time for everything, but to the 

 achievement of one of our Vice-Presidents, Mr. Pargiter, who has 

 recently completed a critical edition and translation of the Markandeya 

 Purana. Now if the absorbing labours of a Judge of the High Court 

 present no barrier to his engaging in the most laborious form of lin- 

 guistic research, how can the plea of overwork be put forward on behalf 

 of the lighter duties — the mere distractions — of other branches of the 

 public service, or of mercantile pursuits ? 



There is another stock apology which, like the former, is used in a 

 loose general way to account for anything in India that is thought for 

 the moment to be out of joint. We are told that since the days of rail- 

 ways and steamers Englishmen in India have become mere birds of pas- 

 sage, that they go to Europe so often that they lose their interest in the 

 East, and get out of touch with the people and their ways. Consequently, 

 so the argument runs, they no longer care to write papers for the Asiatic 

 Society; its journal languishes and its meetings have become dull. The 

 conclusion may or may not be true : the premise is, in my opinion, if not 

 absolutely false, at any rate far too widely stated. There has never been 

 a time when interest in India and in the East generally has been so keen 

 and so widely diffused in Europe as it is at the present day. You see it 

 in every branch of the subject with which this society deals, and it has 

 been and will continue to be enormously quickened by the great political 



