."

"Do you know, dear Vanity, that it is not impossible that King Asoka
(of the Edict Pillars), the 'Constantine of Buddhism,' was an
Eurasian? I have not got the works of Arrian, or Mr. Lethbridge's
'History of the World' at hand, but I have some recollection of
Sandracottus, or one of Asoka's fathers or grandfathers, marrying a
Miss Megasthenes, or Seleucus. With such memories no wonder they call
us 'Mean Whites.'"--ALI BABA, K.C.B.

No. XIV

THE VILLAGER

"Venio nunc ad voluptates agricolarum, quibus ego" (like the
Famine Commissioners) "incredibiliter delector."

[November 8, 1879.]

I missed two people at the Delhi Assemblage of 1877. All the gram-fed
secretaries and most of the alcoholic chiefs were there; but the
famine-haunted villager and the delirium-shattered, opium-eating
Chinaman, who had to pay the bill, were not present.

I cannot understand why Viceroys and English newspapers call the
Indian cultivator a "riot." He never amounts to a riot if you treat
him properly. He may be a disorderly crowd sometimes; but that is only
when you embody him in a police force or convert him into cavalry. The
atomic disembodied villager has no notion of rioting, _ca-ira_
singing, or any of the tomfooleries of revolution. These pastimes are
for men who are both idle and frivolous. When our villager wants to
realise a political idea, he dies of famine. This has about it a
certain air of seriousness. A man will not die of famine unless he be
in earnest.

Lord Bacon's apothegm was that _Eating maketh a full man_; and it
would be better to give the starving cultivator Bacon than the report
of that Commission (which we cannot name without tears and laughter)
which goes to work on the assumption that _writing maketh a full
man_--that to write over a certain area of paper will fill the
collapsed cuticles of the agricultural class throughout India.

When [Sir Richard Temple] first started the idea of holding famines, I
proposed that he should illustrate his project by stopping the pay and
allowances of the Government of India for a month. But he did not
listen to my proposal. People seldom listen to my proposals; and
sometimes I think that this accounts for my constitutional melancholy.

You will ask, "What has all this talk of food and famine to do with
the villager?" I reply, "Everything." Famine is the horizon of the
Indian villager; insufficient food is the foreground. And this is the
more