get their just salaries paid have no means of living except extortion from the ryots. The total present indebtedness of the State amounts to more than £2,000,000. This is exclusive of its obligations of about £1,000,000 to persons who provided capital for the construction of the State railway.

The existence of the kingdom of the Nizam is no immediate danger to our Indian Empire. The military strength of the subsidiary and contingent forces concentrated at Secunderabad and Bolarum, in the immediate vicinity of the capital, is great enough to render any attempt at resistance on the part of the Nizam's troops impossible. But the Nizam is capable of being developed into a most formidable peril. Persons who believe that the future welfare of India is to be sought in the regeneration of the Mussulman power have pointed to the Nizam as the proper head of the Mussulmans in our Indian Empire. For religious, educational, or literary purposes he would never be accepted as such a head. The Mussulmans of Delhi still look upon the Nizam of Hyderabad with contempt as a traitor to his legitimate sovereign, and as one of the chief agents in the ruin of the Delhi kingdom. But the Nizam is well fitted to become a centre of disaffection to the British power, and of plots for its overthrow. In the mutiny Hyderabad remained loyal, and thereby saved Southern India from insurrection. But it was at that time isolated from Northwestern India, with which the rulers of Hyderabad had then neither sympathies nor correspondence. It is not so now. The chief places of the Government are filled with Mussulmans from the north-west, who carry on a constant correspondence with their friends and relatives, and some, it is said, more or less seditious intrigues. The British Government possesses no information as to the public opinion of Hyderabad city. Many of the fanatical and ignorant inhabitants believe that Russia has already captured several of our Indian provinces, and is steadily advancing to the conquest of our empire; and express themselves as by no means averse to a change of masters. Next time we are in trouble in India, either from foreign war or domestic insurrection, Hyderabad will be a very different element in the situation from that which it was in 1857.

In February, 1883, the sudden death of Sir Salar Jung left the kingdom without a ruler, and threw the responsibility of administration into the reluctant hands of the Government of India. Here was a golden opportunity for reforming some of the abuses above described and settling the future government upon a just basis. But the Government of India was quite unequal to the emergency. The Resident was ignorant of the real condition of the people and of the disorder of the finances. Sir Salar Jung was strongly averse to British officials moving about his country, and the only information possessed was that which he had chosen to impart. The Residency had so long

fixed its attention upon the intrigues and quarrels of the warlike populace of the city, that the existence of the peaceful and suffering millions outside had become forgotten. The interference of a Resident in the affairs of an Indian native State is conducted upon no settled principle. It depends partly upon the character and complaisancy of the native rulers, partly upon the personal disposition to activity of the Resident himself. In Hyderabad the extent to which the acts of individual nobles is controlled is almost childish; they are treated like schoolboys. One of the chief nobles desired to see the camp at Bolarum, pitched by and at the cost of the Nizam's government for the entertainment of guests at the installation. He had first to ask the leave of the Resident in the same tone that a boy would ask for a holiday, and received permission in the like strain. But in greater matters, where the welfare of thousands is involved, the Resident shrinks from assuming the responsibility of controlling their individual freedom. The Government at Calcutta has no proper organization for the supervision of the affairs of native States. No permanent member of the executive council is charged with this duty, but such matters are dealt with in a department under the direct control of the Viceroy himself called the Foreign Office. They are there jumbled up together with questions of frontier policy and the external affairs of the Indian Empire. The Viceroy cannot know much of the past history of these native States; if he has come to India to introduce Radical theories into its management he cannot be expected to maintain any stability of policy towards them; and if his whole time is taken up by a prolonged quarrel about a measure affecting the status of half-a-dozen native magistrates, he has little leisure to waste upon a matter of so little political moment as the welfare of 9,000,000 obscure cultivators. It is vain to look for help to his permanent officials. India is a sort of Paradise for permanent officials. They form a class apart—an oligarchy possessing undisputed social and intellectual predominance. They have no meddlesome House of Commons to fear, no parliamentary chiefs to harass them, no press by whose criticisms they need be discomposed. The Viceroy and his advisers spend nine months out of the twelve at Simla, isolated from the world, wrapped in their own self-satisfaction, as much cut off from contact with Indian affairs as if they were in the Caucasus. They know little of the affairs of native States, they have no desire to be informed. Nothing could be more troublesome and inconvenient than to have their eyes rudely opened to the cruelties and wrongs which are perpetrated upon millions under the shelter of British protection, and they resent the misplaced zeal of any person who persists in obtruding such inconvenient facts upon their notice. During the late visit of Lord Ripon to Hyderabad, he took good care to keep out of the way of all those who could have opened

his eyes to the real condition of the State. His time was so fully taken up with childish ceremonies, that he had no leisure to have his complacent satisfaction with himself and his policy shaken by such testimony. But while the Indian Foreign Office takes little regard of the welfare of the millions of people nominally under its supervision, it is great upon all matters of ceremonial and pageantry. At the Nizam's installation it issued pages of print, prescribing how a railway car with two sleeping Hyderabad nobles was at 2 A.M. to meet the train which contained his slumbering Excellency at the frontier, and how at 8 A.M. the noblemen were to get up at a place 100 miles within the boundary to salute his Excellency when he woke. It directed that four noblemen were to drive to Bolarum and back, twenty miles in the burning sun, with carriages, horses, grooms, attendants, and escort, "to inquire after his Excellency's health "— information accessible in five minutes by telegraph. It prescribed the number of steps from his carpet that the Nizam was to advance to meet the Viceroy, and the number that the Viceroy was to advance to meet the Nizam. But there was after all the pains taken a fatal omission. The Viceroy was to gird the Nizam in the name of the Queen Empress with a sword of honour. The Foreign Office omitted to mention upon which side the sword was to be, and Lord Ripon, after a long struggle with the belt, succeeding in presenting the Nizam to the assembled Durbar with his sword on the wrong side, entirely to his own satisfaction, but much to the horror of the native nobles, who regarded it as an evil omen, and probably ascribe the attack of cholera with which the Nizam was afterwards seized to Lord Ripon's blunder. There were a score of other foolish ceremonies more suited to the court of the Grand Duchess of Gerolstein than to the representative of the Queen. I wonder whether, amongst all the pomps and vanity of the wicked city, Lord Ripon and his friends ever bestowed a thought upon the unhappy people by the sweat of whose brow the wealth so lavishly spent on their entertainment was produced.

From these defects in our arrangements for the government of India it came to pass that on Sir Salar Jung's death the British authorities neither knew the wretched condition of the kingdom, nor had the means or desire to reform it. They devoted their energies to keeping everything as it was, till the whole burden could be handed over to the Nizam on his attaining the ripe age of seventeen years and a half, an event looked forward to by them as if it had been the advent of a Solon. A Council of Regency was established with the youthful Nizam as President, combining all the discordant elements in the State. The administration was entrusted to the Peshcar, who for thirty years had been Sir Salar Jung's colleague, and with him was associated Sir Salar Jung's

son, Laik Allay, then a boy of nineteen, to whom the Peshcar generously relinquished the whole of the emoluments which his father had enjoyed as minister. The Peshcar was a Hindu, mild and conciliatory in manner, and eccentric in his mode of conducting business. He carried his documents of State about with him in his pockets, and gave audiences at midnight in a cellar. But he was thoroughly well affected to the British Power, shrewd in his judgment, strongly opposed to the foreign element by which the State was being eaten up, and resolved as soon as he had the chance to sweep it away and employ natives of the State to carry on its affairs. The destruction of the Peshcar thus became to the foreign adventurers a question of life and death. They opposed and thwarted him in every way they could and intrigued for the appointment of Laik Ally as Prime Minister. The Nizam was gained, he had a strong partiality for Laik Ally, the promoter and companion of his boyish dissipation. The officers of the British Residency, however, favoured the Peshcar. After Sir Salar Jung's death they began to learn more of the condition of the kingdom, and the suspicions they had before felt were confirmed by evidence that was now forthcoming. A conspiracy was thereupon set on foot to denounce the Residency officials, who were accused of profligacy and corruption in the most unsparing terms. Lord Ripon, bewildered by his own ignorance and frightened by the violence of the conspirators, yielded as usual to clamour. He threw his own officers overboard, and abetted the Nizam in dismissing with the greatest discourtesy at his installation the old and experienced minister and appointing his favourite to the vacant post.

It would be ungenerous to criticise with severity the characters of the boy ruler and his boy prime minister. They are of the respective ages of seventeen and a half and twenty years. They are plunged by the custom of their race into the excesses of the zenana, where they are exposed to influences quite beyond our control, which have as yet marred the promise of every native Indian prince whom we have taken pains to educate. Neither of them observes the rule of the prophet which forbids the use of intoxicating liquors. They have the absolute control of the public purse, and the traditions of the kingdom do not forbid the application of its funds to purposes of personal enjoyment. The older advisers by whom they are surrounded are the men who even under Sir Salar Jung stripped the ryots of everything they possess, and who can now continue their career of extortion free from the slight check he was able to exercise. They have not one adviser who is a native of the State or has any permanent interest in its welfare. They have learnt that they can successfully set the officials of the British Residency at defiance. They have been taught that the British Power disclaims all responsibility for the sufferings of their subjects, and they have 9,000,000 of people at their absolute mercy. J. E. GORST.

204

EQUESTRIAN SCULPTURE FOR LONDON.

MR. SHAW LEFEVRE's recent article on the statues and monuments of London deserved full recognition from sculptors and the lovers of sculpture. Only those whose business it has been to follow the same line of investigation can know what care and taste was shown in the accumulation and arrangement of facts in a province of which no adequate maps exist. Personal love of his subject and a close study of it were apparent-more study and more love than we have any right to expect from a Minister, to whom the practice of affairs must always take precedence of aesthetics. Nor was the article of the First Commissioner remarkable only for its accuracy or its historical impartiality; it was not merely passive, it actively upheld the hands of those who, like myself, have long been battling with the public for a due recognition of the services of national art. It has ever been the fashion, and the press is much to blame for this, to decry all efforts made to dedicate painting and sculpture to the public use. In contrast with France and Germany, where the Government is encouraged and applauded in every attempt to press the arts into the national service, England seems to prefer to hold aloof, and criticise with asperity. In the art of sculpture this has particularly been the case, and we rejoice at Mr. Shaw Lefevre's judicious praise of the monuments delivered to his care. We shall perhaps hear in future a little less of the customary sweeping denunciation of all English sculptors, past, present, and to come.

The scope of Mr. Shaw Lefevre's article, however, confines him to the consideration of works by dead artists. If he had kept still more strictly to these limits he would have avoided what is perhaps the only instance of injustice in his essay, namely the denunciation of Mr. Brock's statue of Raikes, which, though the subject is neither picturesque nor pleasing, is well-modelled, if too strictly in the style of Foley. This limitation, at all events, has prevented the First Commissioner from telling us what we should have been most glad to hear, namely what his views are with regard to living work and the public sculpture of the immediate future. Enough, however, is known, or has leaked out, to enable us to say that within the next month or two the most important commissions for statuary in London will be given which have been made in England since the Albert Memorial was planned. At Hyde Park Corner and on Blackfriars Bridge works of the highest importance are in process of institution, and it is probable that within a few days after these words are in the hands of our readers all the particulars will be made public. A