The statue of the Queen at Madras was on Tuesday
found smeared with Hindoo religious marks on the forehead, neck, and breast. The police report their belief that the marks are the work of a Hindoo devotee who was worshipping the statue. That explanation is probably correct, for if we mistake not the Queen has been found to be an object of adoration in two or three of the wilder districts of India. It would not be difficult, if it were only right, to create a caste in India whose single caste law would be obedience to the Queen's command, and who would at her order die in thousands in the field. There is nothing in Hindooism opposed to such a cult. The Queen is in her devotees' eyes so great a person, and so uniformly fortunate, that she must in her previous births have accumulated a store of virtue which raises her to the level of the gods. It is a pity we cannot take advantage of the feeling to make a Queen's Guard, say, of twenty thousand men, who could be relied on like Englishmen ; but it would involve hard lying, and hard lying of the sacrilegious kind which always brings about, in one way or another, its own retribution. The deification of the Roman Emperors neither preserved the individual Omaar nor the Roman Empire.
