The Pall Mall Gazelle has a valuable article on the
"mean whites" of India, the children of poor Europeans, or half-castes, who are becoming numerous, and for whom there is no place in the Imperial system. There are colleges for them, notably the great Doveton College in Calcutta, and they have the same right to education as Hindoos or Mohammedans ; but their parents are too poor to pay high fees, and too proud to send them to be taught with natives. Great numbers of them, therefore, grow up ignorant and vicious. They will not take domestic service, they are distrusted and disliked by the educated Europeans, and utterly despised by the natives for their want of morale. They become, therefore, utterly bad—worse, probably, than any class in Europe —and in the course of years may prove an unendurable element in society. The best thing that could happen to them would be to put them through the military mill, using them as acclimatised sappers and miners ç but the Government would hesitate at that step, and it can try no other. It has no right to deport men who are as " native " as any Hindoos, and no power of finding separate
education or maintenance for classes who have no claim, except their nominal creed, to any privileges which natives do not enjoy.
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