A good many Eurasians who are not clerks in public offices, or
telegraph signallers, or merchants, are loafers. They are passed on
wherever they are found, to the next station, and thus they are kept
in healthy circulation throughout India. They are all in search of
employment on the railway; but as a provisional arrangement, to meet
the more immediate and pressing exigencies of life, they will accept a
small gratuity, [or engage themselves in snapping up unconsidered
trifles]. They are mainly supported by municipalities, who keep them
in brandy, rice, and railway-tickets out of funds raised for this
purpose. Workhouses and Malacca canes have still to be tried.

Bishop Gell's plan for colonising the Laccadives and Cocos with these
loafers has not met with much acceptance at Simla. The Home Secretary
does not see from what Imperial fund they can be supplied with
bathing-drawers and barrel-organs; but the Home Secretary ought to
know that there is a philanthropic society at Lucknow of the
disinterested, romantic, Turnerelli type, ready to furnish all the
wants of a young colony, from underclothing to Eno's fruit salt.

A great many wise proposals emanate from Simla as regards some
artificial future for the Eurasian. One Ten-thousand-pounder asks
Creation in a petulant tone of surprise why Creation does not make the
Eurasian a carpenter; another looks round the windy hills and wonders
why somebody does not make the Eurasian a high farmer. The shovel hats
are surprised that the Eurasian does not become a missionary, or a
schoolmaster, or a policeman, or something of that sort. The native
papers say, "Deport him"; the white prints say, "Make him a soldier";
and the Eurasian himself says, "Make me a Commissioner, or give me a
pension." In the meantime, while nothing is being done, we can rail at
the Eurasian for not being as we are.

"Let us sit on the thrones
In a purple sublimity,
And grind down men's bones
To a pale unanimity."

There is no proper classification of the mixed race in India as there
is in America. The convenient term _quadroon_, for instance, instead
of "four annas in the rupee," is quite unknown; the consequence is
that every one--from Anna Maria de Souza, the "Portuguese" cook, a
nobleman on whose cheek the best shoe-blacking would leave a white
mark, to pretty Miss Fitzalan Courtney, of the Bombay Fencibles, who
is as white as an Italian princess--is called an "Eurasian