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Objections to European Overseers.

The objections to the employment of Europeans as overseers are, that the salaries allotted for this class of work are seldom sufficient to secure good men; and a badly paid overseer cannot be expected to render either efficient or honest service. Really respectable men will hardly accept such service unless under the pressure of actual want and to keep the wolf from the door for the time being, and the only class from which European overseers may be obtained at the rate of salaries usually considered sufficient,-viz., pensioned or time-expired soldiers,-seldom acquire the language sufficiently well, or understand the people, or they them, and they are thus apt, ignorantly and unintentionally it may be, to offend the prejudices or wound the feelings of the native population. That this is the case is not to be wondered at when we consider the only experience they have had of native life and character. This has, as a rule, been restricted to the bazaars in the cantonment, and the purlieus of the barrack, where they have been brought into contact with only the very lowest, most disreputable, and most abandoned specimens of the natives of the country, male or female. They thus imbibe erroneous views of native life and character and prejudices, which are sure to bear unpleasant fruit. in after years when a transfer to civil employment in the country brings them into wider and closer connexion with the people. The dislike is mutual, the Bengalee naturally resents the domiciliary visits of the European or Eurasian overseer much more than he does those of his own countryman, especially if he be one of the superior castes; and when to the fact of the intrusion on his

Results of State Education.

17

privacy is possibly added harsh language, or what he may consider insult, arising most likely from imperfect knowledge of the vernacular, his indignation is aroused, and complaints are preferred to the higher authorities.

Europeans of this class are also too often given to intemperate habits, and this, combined with insufficient pay, lays them open to manifold temptations, which their native subordinates are too ready to take advantage of to their own profit, and the ultimate ruin of the unfortunate tools of their rascality.

On the whole, therefore, we must depend on Eurasians and on natives of the country principally as overseers, and we can only hope that, by careful selection and good training, we shall, in time, secure a better class of men than we have at present. It is true that the country now swarms with the alumni of our local colleges; the outcome of that system of State education which bids fair to leave Bengal without tillers of the soil, artizans, and traders, while swamping the professions, the public offices, and every department and business, where a knowledge of the three R's is

a

necessary qualification, with B.A.'s or B.L.'s, or holders of some degree or another. Indeed, so impressed is the native mind with the open-sesame powers of a little learning, that, a by-no-means-uncommon qualification of many who now apply for clerkships and other appointments, is, "that they have studied at the so-and-so institution, and failed to pass the Entrance Examination." If they are not the rose, they have been near the rose.”

B

18

Sanitation and Natural Laws.

CHAPTER III.

"Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.”—Horace.
(Though you should expel or restrain nature by force, she will
still resume her sway.)

It is an incontrovertible fact, that "the more man follows nature and is obedient to her laws, the longer are his chances of life; and the further he departs from following them, the shorter and more troublous will be his existence." Equally true is it, that the bulk of the insanitary evils with which we are afflicted arise from neglect of, or departure from, those laws of nature. "which govern and support the mighty frame of universal being."

No doubt, of late years, there has been a great awakening of sanitary science as applied to the surroundings of our everyday life, but that this is so must be ascribed to the increasing artificiality of our modern ways and habits, which, departing more and more from the simple paths of nature, carry with them or create an attending train of evils, and, as a consequence, necessitate their remedy by artificial means.

The unwritten laws of sanitation are as old as the beginning of the world, but the first written precepts on the subject are those of Moses, the great Hebrew lawgiver, which he delivered to the Israelites when they came up out of the land of Egypt.

Hindu Neglect of Sanitation.

19

In fact the keynote of all our modern systems of conservancy of towns and encampments is to be found in the 23rd chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy. //Ancient, however, as sanitary laws may be, they do not seem to have been in vogue at any time among the Hindus; and this, although the Hindu shastras teem with laws for the purification of the body and household cleansing. Mill says that, in spite of the frequency and care with which Hindus perform religious ablutions, few nations are surpassed by them in the total want of physical purity in their houses, streets, and persons." In support of his views he quotes Mr. Forster, "whose long residence in India and knowledge of the country render him an excellent witness," and who, speaking of the narrow streets of the sacred city of Benares, says: "In addition to the pernicious effects which must proceed from a confined atmosphere, there is, in the hot season, an intolerable stench arising from the many pieces of stagnant water dispersed in different quarters of the town. The filth also which is indiscriminately thrown into the streets and there left exposed (for the Hindus possess but a small portion of general cleanliness) adds to the compound of evil smells." The author whose duties at one time required him to patrol the streets of Benares from ten at night till gunfire in the morning, can confirm what is said above of the streets of that city, although it is probable that municipal improvement has now somewhat remedied the old state of things. In 1864, the Hon'ble John Strachey, then President of the Sanitary Commission for Bengal, wrote of the northern or native part of Calcutta, which contains some hundred thousand people, that it was

(C no

20

Customs of the Hindus.

figure of speech but the simple truth to say, that no language can adequately describe its abominations. In the filthiest quarters of the filthiest towns that I have éver seen, either in other parts of India or in other countries, I have never seen anything which can be for a moment compared with the filthiness of Calcutta."

The authors of the Universal History, also quoted by Mill, describe with pure and picturesque simplicity a custom of the Hindus, which must be pretty familiar to an old Indian resident "The women scruple no more than the men to do their occasions in the public streets and highways, for which purpose they go out in droves to some dead wall in the city, so that it is ill taking the air either in the streets or without the towns near the river and ditches." And an old medical writer on the endemic fever of Bengal says: "The banks of the sacred Ganges, which supplies alike drink for the living and a final receptacle for the dead, presents, particularly about the rising and the setting of the sun, a motley group of all classes, and sometimes both sexes, sacrificing to the Goddess Cloacina, in colloquial association; and in some places, where eddies prevail, a whole vortex of putrid corpses may be seen circling about for hours together, and from one hundred to one hundred and fifty of these disgusting objects may be counted passing any one point in the course of a day.”

The late Dr. Cutcliffe, whilst Civil Surgeon of Dacca, wrote of the condition of that ancient city:

It must be admitted, I conceive, that, in Dacca, for ages past, the excreta from the entire population has been allowed to remain in and about the houses and