It has been said, however, that the causes of this animosity, which has recently been shown in violent disputes over cow-killing, are not in reality so much religious as political-that the Hindus, who are much the more numerous, look forward to predominance in all State departments and in all representative bodies, while the Mahomedans deeply and justly resent any such possible subordination. The Arya Samâj, already mentioned, carries high the flag of advancing Hinduism in politics as well as in religion; and its missionary ardour has brought the party into sharp controversy with Northern Islam. We have to remember that the Maratha conquests of the eighteenth century represented a great rising of Hindus against Mahomedan governors, so that the tradition of rulership exists on both sides. But it is an old saying among Oriental statesmen that 'Government and Religion are twins,' which is interpreted to mean that rulership is intimately bound up with the protection of every faith professed by the subjects. And the British Indian Government, which is perhaps the only government in the world, outside America, that practises complete religious neutrality, has very strictly kept, since 1858, the pledge then given by the Queen's Proclamation declaring it to be 'our Royal will and pleasure that none be molested or disturbed by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy equal and impartial protection of the law.' It is true that a fine point has been occasionally raised by some case where religious custom has prescribed what the law upon higher ethical grounds is constrained to forbid. But in such conflicts of jurisdiction the secular authority must prevail, for nobody has ever doubted (as Sir Henry Maine said once) that the purely moral view of questions is one of the things that are Cæsar's.' The general conclusion, so far as it is possible to collect evidence of religious tendencies, would be that the last sixty years in India have witnessed a gradual relaxation of caste rules, which were never so rigid as is commonly supposed, and that the external polytheism has been shaken by the mobility of modern life. Renan, in his book, Les Apôtres, affirms that the religious inferiority of the Greeks and Romans was the consequence of their political and intellectual superiority. If (he says) they had possessed a priesthood, severe theologic creeds, and a highly organised religion, they would never have created the État laïque, or inaugurated the idea of a national society founded on simple human needs and conveniences. In India, where the atmosphere is still intensely religious, these Western notions of the State and of civic policy have never taken root. We do not know what future awaits Brahmanism when brought more closely into contact with modern ideas. Yet it seems certain that as in Europe the fall of the Roman Empire made way for the building up of the great mediæval Church with its powerful ecclesiastic organisation, so, conversely, some large reform or dissolution of the ancient religious frame work of Indian society will be necessary to make room for civilisation on a secular basis. In the higher branches of indigenous literature the Victorian period has little to exhibit. Throughout the greater part of India it had been at a standstill since the disruption of the Moghul Empire; and correct prose writing may be almost said to have come in with the English language. It would be a mistake to suppose that Stateaided instruction in India began with the English dominion. The Court of Directors, writing as far back as 1814, referred with particular satisfaction 'to that distinguished feature of internal polity by which the instruction of the people is provided for by a certain charge upon the produce of the soil, and by other endowments in favour of the village teachers, who are thereby rendered public servants of the community.' And Lord Macaulay's celebrated minute, which in 1835 determined the Anglicising of all the higher education, is not quite so triumphantly unanswerable as it is usually assumed to be; for we have to reckon on the other side the disappearance of the indigenous systems, and the decay of the study of the Oriental classics in their own language. The new learning has been taken up by other classes; it is now in possession of all the best Indian intellects; but the inevitable consequence has been a lack of originality in style and thought; the literature, being exotic, bears no very distinctive impress of the national character. In the domain of native Art we must strike a similar balance of loss and gain. Some important industries have multiplied and found larger markets, and latterly much attention has been paid to the encouragement of the finer Indian crafts. But the opening of safe and easy trade routes between Europe and Asia has drawn in upon the East a flood of cheap manufactures from the West. European capital and commerce, backed by steam, coal, and the pressure of a great industrial community, are overwhelming the weaker, poorer, and more leisurely handicrafts of India. Great Britain now deals with India mainly by importing food and raw material, which are paid for by machines and machine-made commodities that rapidly displace the slow production of native artisans. On the other hand, India's railways, factories, and public works find day labour for a very great number; and the outlets for raw produce are helping agriculture. But what is good for trade may be bad for art; and the decay of ancient callings, the shifting of workmen from the finer to the rougher occupations, the turning of the cottage artisan into the factory hand, are painful transitions when they come rapidly. Architecture, which has always been the principal method of artistic expression in India, is losing ground, partly through the influence of European buildings designed by engineers, and partly through the vulgarisation of the literary faculty. In all ages the higher polytheism has been favourable to the arts of building and sculpture; but in these latter days the religious idea begins to find its expression more frequently in print than in symbolical stone carving of temples and images. On the other hand, the preservation of ancient monuments, which had been entirely neglected by preceding dynasties, has been taken in charge by the British Government all over India. Yet, on the whole, the spirit of the Victorian era, which was first military and administrative, then industrial and scientific, cannot be said to have been favourable to Indian Art. In so very brief a review of a long reign it has been impossible to do more than touch lightly upon salient points and draw general outlines. The nineteenth century has been pre-eminently a law-making and administering age; but perhaps nowhere in the world during the last sixty years have so many changes, direct and indirect, been made in the condition of a great population as in India. As Maine has said, the capital fact in the mechanism of modern States is the energy of legislatures; and that energy has found an open field in India, particularly for the settlement of the executive power on a legal basis, and for adjusting it to a variety of needs and circumstances. The distribution of the whole Empire into provinces has virtually taken place in the Queen's reign. Up to 1836 there were only the three Presidencies of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras, with their capitals at the old trading headquarters of the Company on the Indian sea-coast. There are now ten provinces, besides the Government of India, which superintends them all. In regard to external relations, before 1837 they were chiefly with the native Indian States; for, although we had kept up and turned into political agencies the Company's ancient commercial stations in the Persian Gulf and at Bagdad, at that time British frontiers nowhere touched the Asiatic kingdoms lying beyond 'India proper, except on a wild Burmese border to the south-east. Our extreme political frontiers now march for long distances with Persia, Russia, and China; they touch Siam and French Cambodia; and the diplomatic agencies of the Indian Government are stationed on the Persian Gulf, in Turkish Arabia, and round westward by Muscat, Aden, as far as African Somaliland. The foundations of this empire were laid long ago by men who clearly foresaw what might be done with India; it has been completed and organised in Her Majesty's reign; the date of the Queen's accession stands nearly half way in its short history, being exactly eighty years after Clive's exploit at Plassey.2 And the permanent consolidation of the union between Great Britain and India will demand all the political genius-the sympathetic insight as well as the scientific methods-of England, co-operating with the good will and growing intelligence of the Indian people. A. C. LYALL. 2 Battle of Plassey, June 23, 1757. The Queen's accession, June 20, 1837. Diamond Jubilee, June 22, 1897. THE FORTHCOMING NAVAL REVIEW AND ITS PREDECESSORS In the annals of our Navy the great reviews which have been held from time to time at Spithead supply, as it were, the paragraph marks. They occur only at considerable intervals, and to mark some historic occasion. The royal review of 1814, when the Prince Regent and the Allied sovereigns inspected the very shot-dinted and battle-worn ships that had helped to win for us our sovereignty of the sea, was the fitting culmination of our Navy's heroic period. The royal review of 1845 was the funeral pageant of the sailing ship of war. The reviews of 1853 and 1854 were menacing demonstrations rather than holiday stock-takings of strength; but the magnificent assemblage of 1856 has a momentous importance, since then the ironclad first made its gala appearance at Spithead. Few as yet suspected how far-reaching the revolution in naval architecture was destined to be. In 1867, to do honour to the Sultan, for the first time sea-going ironclads were in our line of battle, though even now side by side with the three-decker. Eleven years later, in 1878, the old line-of-battle ship had gone, but armour-clads with wooden hulls still figured in our squadrons. Not till 1887 was the great transformation of our fleet accomplished, or had steel and iron finally driven wood from the field. The review of 1889 was but the postscript to 1887, as that of 1878 might be called the postscript to 1867. The review of the 26th of June 1897 will transcend all these past reviews in importance. There will, it is true, be fewer pennants collected than in 1856; but in displacement, offensive and defensive power, and destructive force, this fleet of our own time will altogether outrival that of 1856. And yet we have not reached finality: it may even be that posterity will ear-mark this review as the funeral ceremony of the gigantic ironclad and of the piston-using pattern of marine steam-engine. Already the trials of the Turbinia and of the wheel-ship Bazin are opening up a new vista for marine engineers; already submarine navigation has entered on the stage of practicability, whilst aërial navigation is in the stage of possibility. For whenever the implements of war attain their most absolute per fection, history shows that a transformation in kind is at hand. It will therefore be the surest epitome of naval progress to glance at the various types of ships which have figured in the epoch-making reviews that I have mentioned. The fleet which the Allied rulers reviewed at Spithead on the 23rd of June 1814 was composed entirely of wooden sailing ships. Fourteen sail-of-the-line and thirty-one frigates and smaller craft were marshalled on this occasion, under the command of the Duke of Clarence, as Lord High Admiral. The Impregnable was the flagship, and as such was visited by the Prince Regent, the Emperor Alexander, and King Frederick William. Alexander delighted the men by going into a marines' berth, where eleven men were sitting at dinner, and eating with them; and we are told that his sister, the Duchess of Oldenburg, ' endured the shock of firing salutes with great fortitude.' The Impregnable herself was of 2,278 tons, a 98-gun ship by the official rating, though her ten carronades brought her total battery up to 108 guns. She was, therefore, by no means one of the largest ships; indeed, we had ten of greater size and force at sea or in reserve. Her heaviest gun was the old 32-pounder smooth-bore, mounted on the rudest truck carriage, without sights or elevating screw: her broadside 1,018 lb. Her total crew was, when she was fully manned, 743-officers, men, and boys. The men were raised by impressment or recruited voluntarily for the ship's commission; we had not as yet adopted our present admirable system of manning the fleet. The discipline was arbitrary and cruel; there were merciless floggings with the cat for the smallest offences, and the number of lashes inflicted varied from a dozen or half-dozen to 500 and even 1,000. Reading the court-martials of those days, one alternately wonders how the officers held down the gangs of ruffians they commanded, and how the men endured the manifold brutalities of their officers. Brave to a superlative degree as these men were, with that fiery courage which welcomes battle and death, they cannot compare in quality with the officers and men who now take our ships to sea. Everywhere, except in the highest ranks, where our captains and admirals are too old, the change has been one wholly for the good. Yet it has not kept pace with the times, and to-day our sailors are poorly paid and not too well fed. Between 1814 and 1857 came the adoption of the shell gunthe invention of General Paixhans-and the introduction of steam. Paddle steamers were built for the Navy as far back as 1822, and in 1837 the first screw steamer made its appearance—not as yet in our fleet. The line-of-battle ship at the Queen's accession still trusted to the winds for propulsive force. The paddle obviously could not be employed, as it was very much exposed to shot and shell, and furthermore took up very much space on the broadside; it was never |