at Britain
to-day. Goa was then the most important city in the East, for
its wealth and commerce rivaled that of Genoa or Venice. It was
as large as Paris or London, and the viceroy lived in a palace
as fine as that occupied by the king. But very little evidence of
its former magnificence remains. Its grandeur was soon exhausted
when the Dutch and the East India Company came into competition
with the Portuguese. The Latin race has never been tenacious either
in politics or commerce. Like the Spaniards, the Portuguese have
no staying power, and after a struggle lasting seventy years,
all of the wide Portuguese possessions in the East fell into the
hands of the Dutch and the British, and nothing is now left but
Goa, with its ruins and reminiscences and the beautiful shrine
of marble and jasper, which the Grand Duke of Tuscany erected
in honor of the first great missionary to the East.

IV

THE EMPIRE OF INDIA

India is a great triangle, 1,900 miles across its greatest length
and an equal distance across its greatest breadth. It extends
from a region of perpetual snow in the Himalayas, almost to the
equator. The superficial area is 1,766,642 square miles, and
you can understand better what that means when I tell you that
the United States has an area of 2,970,230 square miles, without
counting Alaska or Hawaii. India is about as large as that portion
of the United States lying east of a line drawn southward along
the western boundary of the Dakotas, Kansas and Texas.

The population of India in 1901 was 294,361,056 or about one-fifth
of the human race, and it comprises more than 100 distinct nations
and peoples in every grade of civilization from absolute savages to
the most complete and complex commercial and social organizations.
It has every variety of climate from the tropical humidity along
the southern coast to the frigid cold of the mountains; peaks of
ice, reefs of coral, impenetrable jungles and bleak, treeless
plains. One portion of its territory records the greatest rainfall
of any spot on earth; another, of several hundred thousand square
miles, is seldom watered with a drop of rain and is entirely
dependent for moisture upon the melting snows of the mountains.
Twelve thousands different kinds of animals are enumerated in
its fauna, 28,000 plants in its flora, and the statistical survey
prepared by the government fills 128 volumes of the size of our
census reports. One hundred and eighteen distinct