tianity than India." Then God has been busy there! Sir William Hunter, Sir Richard Temple, Professor Max Müller, and Sir Monier Williams, whose names are synonyms for knowledge of India, share our hope. It is not a strong delusion, a craze of fanatics, but the one luminous historical fact of to-day, that there is a New India which is the great opportunity of the Church of Christ.

Our empire there is the romance of history. Colossal and converging providences have overruled feuds and ambitions and wars in Europe and Asia, to give India, with the care of one-fifth of the race, into British hands. What shall we as Christians do with an opportunity which is beyond measure or estimate?

Let us see what are the altered conditions there since Carey's day that should spur us to greater diligence or fill us with diviner hope.

THE POPULATION.

The magnitude of our work in evangelising the land is seen when we reflect that the New India is twice as populous as that of Carey's day. Including the four millions of Upper Burma, the population of India in 1892 is not less than 290 millions. With an annual increase of three millions, who does not feel, even without looking on so far as another centenary and a population of over 600 millions, that social problems grow more complex with every decade? Their only solution is in the brotherhood that faith in Christ creates. The millions to be evangelised multiply fast. We have already at least two Indias where Carey had but one.

PEACE.

War does not now waste the land as then. The Pax Britannica is a shelter from that invasion and internecine strife which formerly depopulated whole provinces. But the era of peace came in slowly. It was in our Jubilee year that the disasters of Afghanistan befell us, when only one man escaped to Jellalabad of an army of fifteen thousand men. If the Sikh wars are mentioned, it is to show the effects of British rule, and to give an instance of God's strange ways with us in India. The first Sikh war, in 1845-6, with four dreadful battles in fifty-four days, shook our Indian Empire to its foundations. The second Sikh war, in 1848-9, led to the annexation of the Punjab. This was followed by perhaps the most beneficent and rapid changes that ever passed over an eastern, or any, land. Till then the Punjab

was a chaos where infanticide, sati, thuggee, dacoity, slavery, and the tyranny of an unexampled military despotism flourished. By 1857 the Lawrences and Durand had made it the model province of the Empire; and the Sikhs, who had fought us with desperate valour in two bloody wars but a few years before, now followed John Lawrence in the day of our sorest need, and became, equally with the flower of our British troops, England's sword arm in the Mutiny. Those quiet years of patient work in the Punjab enabled John Lawrence (one of Carey's students) to earn the title of Saviour of our Indian Empire. The Mutiny was a fiery trial for all mission work, and stories of the heroic martyrdoms of native Christians and of the steadfastness of many survivors proclaim its worth. That time of trouble which closed the East India Company's rule seems also to have closed the period of great wars. Certainly the "general and spontaneous offer of the swords and treasure of Indian chiefs for the purpose of repelling or preventing attack upon the North-Western frontier of India" in 1884 and 1887 was an unexampled good omen. Peace in the New India should serve the Prince of Peace.

PLENTY.

Famine, too, is stayed almost as completely as war by our British rule. Twenty-three years before Carey's landing, as we have seen, famine swept away one-third of the population of Bengal.† In 1877 a still greater famine, probably the greatest ever known in India, fell upon Madras. But note the change: four railway lines were carrying to the starving people food equal to seven million meals a day! Only thirty years earlier not one-tenth part of that produce could have been carried into the districts in time to save life.

MEANS OF COMMUNICATION.

For the very roads as well as the canals and railroads of India are our creation. In the eighteenth century the few roads made by Muhammedan rulers were ruined; all the routes were infested by robbers, and all the States disturbed by war. Now the great routes are macadamised, and as safe as English highways; and roads well metalled and bridged are found even in the Deccan and in Southern India, where communication by road and canal was always inferior to that of the North.

The canals, too, are ours; for the ancient works were practically worthless. Indeed, thirty-three years ago the acres irrigated from all the canal systems were scarcely 1,500,000; in 1889-90 they were nearly 13,000,000. Ninety-eight per cent. of all the cultivated land in the province of Sind depends upon canal water. North and south canals change deserts into gardens, and serve as great waterways besides. The Ganges Canal, opened in 1854, is the largest and most beneficent work of its kind ever undertaken by man. The area of irrigation, through Government works alone, is now certainly larger than the eight largest counties in England-Yorkshire, Lincoln, Devon, Norfolk, Northumberland, Lancashire, Essex, and Somerset. But all the irrigated lands of British India represent about three times that area, or one-fifth of the whole crop area.

Railways, too, bring closer together the remote corners of the land, make four or five hundred miles instead of twenty the length of a day's journey, and carry the poorest passengers for less than one farthing a mile. The Suez Canal brings India nearer to England, while railroads help toward a unity that India never yet possessed, and give permanence to British power there so long as we command the sea. Instead of less than 400 miles at the time of the Mutiny there were 16,277 miles of railway open at the close of 1890, and 2,272 more in course of construction.

Peace and food, in place of war, famine, and pestilence, explain the unexampled increase of population under British rule; and canal, road, railroad, and telegraph, that serve the farmer and the merchant, may help the missionary on his way to much people with the Bread of Life.

LAND TENURES.

How do these hundreds of millions live? Agriculture is the great industry of India, and probably no man ever took a deeper interest in Indian agriculture than William Carey. It employs in various ways four-fifths, perhaps nine-tenths, of the population. There are literally millions of five-acre farms. "By the ancient custom of India the occupiers of the soil had the right to retain their holdings so long as they paid the rent or revenue demandable from them."† Village communities or proprietary brotherhoods were often the units taxed. In Southern India, where, speaking generally, the State is the landlord and the rent is revenue, the ancient custom is unchanged. But † Ibid.

* Blue Book.