contract by those best fitted
for it, and when such affairs will be looked upon as belonging simply
to the police function of existence, which negatively secures us from
harm, without at all positively touching the substantial advancement
of man's life."

The next day we fared northward toward Agra, by Duttiah, Gwalior and
Dholepore. Learning at Agra that the northward-bound train--for
here we had come upon complete civilization again in the East Indian
Railway--would pass in an hour, we determined to reserve the Taj
Mahal (the lovely Pearl Mosque of Agra) until we should be returning
from Delhi to Calcutta. Bhima Gandharva desired me, however, to see
the Douab country and the old sacred city of Mattra; and so when we
had reached Hatras Station, a few miles north of Agra, we abandoned
the railway and struck across to the south-westward, toward Mattra, in
a hired carriage.

We were now veritably in ancient Hindustan. It was among these level
plains through which we were rolling that the antique Brahmins came
and propounded that marvelous system which afterward took the whole
heart of the land. Nothing could have been more striking than to cast
one's eye thus over the wide cotton-fields--for one associates cotton
with the New--and find them cultivated by these bare-legged and
breech-clouted peasants of the Douab, with ploughs which consisted
substantially of a crooked stick shod with iron at the end, and with
other such farming-implements out of the time that one thinks of
as forty centuries back. Yet in spite of this primitive rudeness
of culture, and of an aridity of soil necessitating troublesome
irrigation, these plains have for a prodigious period of time
supported a teeming population; and I could not help crying out to
Bhima Gandharva that if we had a few millions of these gentle and
patient peasants among the cotton-fields of the United States, the
South would quickly become a Garden of Delight and the planters could
build Jammah Masjids with rupees for marble.

[Illustration: PEASANTS OF THE DOUAB.]

The conservatism which has preserved for so long a time the ancient
rude methods of industry begins to grow on one as one passes between
these villages of people who seem to be living as if they were
perfectly sure that God never intended them to live any other way.

"It is not long," said my friend, "since a British officer of
engineers, on some expedition or other, was encamped for the night
at no great dis