26 SEPTEMBER 1891, Page 15

MUNEEPORE.

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]

SIR,—The experiment of converting the child Raja of an uncivilised people into " a brown Englishman," has already been at least once tried, with results which fully justify your observations on its probable consequences.

The chief of one of the Orissa Hill States having died, his heir, then a child, was taken charge of by the Court of Wards, and was educated under its superintendence. On the heir attaining his majority, he was duly placed on the Gaddee, but his hill-subjects would have nothing to do with him, his ways were not as their ways, and about twenty years ago a rebellion broke out in the State. Fortunately, the then Lieu- tenant-Governor was a man of energy and resource. He col- lected his police, and with the aid of a portion of the Madras Regiment, then in Orissa, suppressed the insurrection without troubling the Government of India.

In consequence of his thus dealing with it as a purely domestic affair, hardly any one outside the Secretariat was aware of the existence of a civil war, and the incident has fallen into oblivion ; but it certainly confirms your views as to