and enlarge upon the great
fundamental truths so eloquently set forth in our four-line poetry
piece.

If it be sound logic to say that "God must have loved the common
people because he made so many of them," then the Creator must also
have a special fondness for these "poor benighted Hindus," for within
an area less than half the size of the United States more than
300,000,000 of them live and move and have their being. That is to
say, if the United States were as thickly populated as India, it would
contain 600,000,000 people. It is also said that when the far-flung
battle-line of Imperial Rome had reached its uttermost expansion that
great empire had within its borders only half as many people as there
are in India to-day. India and its next-door neighbor, China, contain
half the population of the whole earth. In other words, if the Chinese
and East Indians were the equals of the other races in military
prowess the combined armies of all other nations on the globe, of
every nation in Europe, North America, South America, Africa,
Australia, the Isles of the Sea, and of the rest of Asia, would be
required to defeat them.

Obviously, such a considerable portion of the human family calls for
special study. And if we would study them we must not confine
ourselves to a tour of a few cities in North India, interesting as
these cities are.

The significant man in India (where about eight tenths of the people
live on the soil) is not the trader, a city-dweller in these few large
centres of population, but the ryot or farmer, in the thousands and
thousands of little mud-house villages between the Himalaya slopes and
Cape Comorin. The significant economic fact in India is not the
millions of dollars once spent on royal palaces but the $7 to $30
spent in building this average peasant's home or hut. The significant
social fact is not the income of some ancient Mogul or some modern
Rajah {212} estimated in lakhs of rupees, but the five or six cents a
day which is a laborer's wage for millions and millions of the people.

For these reasons I have been no more interested in the famous cities
I have seen than in the little rural villages whose names may have
never found place in an English book. Let us get, if we can, a pen
picture of one of these villages in north central India.

As I approached it from a distance it looked like an enormous mass of
ant-hills, for the low windowless one-story huts, as has been
suggested, are m