mercial and manufacturing establishments
scattered over India, or spread over the ocean. Their great error was
in mistaking nominal for real profits. Calculating their dividend on
the nominal profits, and never supposing that there could be any such
things as losses in commercial speculation, or bad debts from
misfortunes and bad faith, they squandered them in lavish hospitality
and ostentatious display, or allowed their retiring members to take
them to England and to every other part of the world where their
creditors might not find them, till they discovered that all the real
capital left at their command was hardly sufficient to pay back with
the stipulated interest one-tenth of what they had borrowed. The
members of those houses who remained in India up to the time of the
general wreck were of course reduced to ruin, and obliged to bear the
burthen of the odium and indignation which the ruin of so many
thousands of confiding constituents brought down upon them. Since
that time the savings of civil and military servants have been
invested either in Government securities at a small interest, or in
banks, which make their profit in the ordinary way, by discounting
bills of exchange, and circulating their own notes for the purpose,
or by lending out their money at a high interest of 10 or 12 per
cent. to other members of the same services.[15]

On the 16th of January we went on to Horal, ten miles over a plain,
with villages numerous and large, and in every one some fine large
building of olden times--sarai, palace, temple, or tomb, but all
going to decay.[16] The population much more dense than in any of the
native states I have seen; villages larger and more numerous; trade
in the transit of cotton, salt, sugar, and grain, much brisker. A
great number of hares were here brought to us for sale at threepence
apiece, a rate at which they sell at this season in almost all parts
of Upper India, where they are very numerous, and very easily caught
in nets.

Notes:

1. Kosi is twenty-five miles north-west of Mathura.

2. The story of the murder of Mr. Fraser is fully detailed _post_ in
Chapter 64. After the execution of Shams-ud-din, the estate of the
criminal was taken possession of by Government, and the town of
Firozpur is now the head-quarters of a sub-collectorship of the
Gurgaon district in the Panjab. The Delhi territories were placed
under the government of the Lieutenant-Governor of the Panjab in
1858.

3.