The English habit of self-depreciation extends nowadays to everything. The
cholera, it seems, though now "normal," has recently been severe in the North-West Provinces of India, thirty-eight thousand persons having died of it in the month of August. As usual, the victims are the poor and the weak ; and a native journal remarks that those who eat only one meal a day are swept away the first. That is probably true; but upon it the Echo remarks that the poor Hindoo who so dies pays our ever-increasing taxes to carry on our wars, and to maintain a host of Englishmen in luxury. Salt costs, we admit, a half- penny a pound in India, which is dear ; but will the Echo just name another tax which the poorest Indian either does pay, or may pay p India is, for its poor, an untaxed country ; and one of the grand difficulties of our rule is that under it the population increases at a rate which in some provinces overtasks the fertility of the soil. It is the goodness of our rule, not its badness, which causes such hunger as there is ; but Englishmen enjoy self. censure, as Frenchmen enjoy self-glorification, or Irishmen self- pity.
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