THE MENTAL EFFECT OF PECUNIARY PRESSURE.

society involves all miseries, hunger, and starvation, as it were, together. He overwork, humiliation, is scarcely suffi- cannot or at least does not realize that cient, for human beings able to judge the suffering of having to eat "skilly" would choose them all in preference to and the suffering of being without a meal cancer. We believe the causes for this cannot happen simultaneously to the same overweening horror of poverty, which individual. He would fear cancer for his certainly exists, and with many classes daughter quite as much as poverty, but in this country furnishes an overpower- he knows what poverty would be, and ing motive in life, are two, both of them does not, though he thinks he does, fully easy to be explained. The first cause realize the disease. The second cause undoubtedly is that men fear most those we believe to be the sense of injustice future troubles which they most clearly which enters into this peculiar form of realize, and that they realize very few. suffering. Men submit to evils visibly The majority of mankind, fortunately for dealt out to them by Heaven or fate with themselves, have very little imagination, a resignation they are often unable to and that imagination is most easily stirred display under evils in which human will upon its hopeful side. Every man must is an operating cause. die, and how very few think often of that man who commits suicide from pecungreatest of events! It is the hardestiary pressure will always be found to be We take it, the thing in the world to induce men ever to a man who has worked, and who has expect pain, and the man who knows per- raged secretly or openly at the apparent fectly well that a burst of temper will injustice involved in work bringing no bring on angina pectoris or that a glass return. Nothing overturns the balance of sherry will renew the torture of gout, still indulges his anger or his taste without any serious fear. The best argument against transportation as a punishment is that criminals have such a difficulty in realizing its meaning - soldiers, for instance, in India, often try to be transported-and it is the same want of imagination which, even in countries where the population has a horror of suffering, makes universal conscription possible. People do, however, realize poverty, realize it thoroughly and painfully, and dread it, therefore, as they never dread very much worse evils. They know what it is to have no money, and the prospect of having none affects them as keenly as if they were already destitute. The man, therefore, who sees destitution coming on, say, for twelve months, is therefore as far as the strain on him is concerned, a man who for twelve months has been destitute, and has suffered all, and more than all, that destitution implies. It is not true, perhaps, to say that nothing is so painful as imagination pictures it, for many pains, such as tic, are probably worse, but nothing is so painful as imagination pictures it in a man whose imagination is thoroughly informed. He collects together involuntarily all the terrors of the situation, which in fact would be dispersed, and expects the workhouse

of the mind so quickly as a long-continued sense of injustice, and nothing, especially in the army and merchant navy, is so frequent a cause of suicide. The man who is gliding into poverty from no fault of his own, or from a fault he does not perceive, is apt, unless a man of singularly well-balanced judgment, to feel himself oppressed, and oppressed by power which is resistless, without being in any sense divine; he is compelled to fight, as it were, without weapons, and as it is not open to him in this world to decline the struggle, he leaves this world behind.

should be made without straw excites a Pharaoh's order that bricks sort of horror in the minds of millions who do not know why straw was needed; and a little tradesman without capital, who toils like a slave, yet all in vain, constantly feels as the Jews did, as if he were fighting against a power which could not be mollified either by labour or obedience, but returns for submission only a demand for the impossible, and for labour only the sarcasm, No other form of misery, except perhaps, religious persecution, produces You are idle." quite this impression, or, when it is continuous, so destroys the spring in most men's minds, the human breast," rupt's. "Hope springs eternal in except the bank

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66

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We may not reach Thee through the void im- Have ended all in hateful strife,

From The Quarterly Review.
INDIAN MISSIONS.*

demand for information has been excited. We purpose, therefore, to give our read

INDIA has always from the most an-ers some idea of the position and pros

pects of Indian missions. In proceeding to do so we think it desirable at the outset to help our readers to realize in some degree the vastness, the variety, and the difficulty of the field in which those missions are carried on, that they may be enabled to form something like a correct estimate both of the results that have already been attained and of the results that may still be expected.

The possessions which have fallen to the lot of the English nation in India and the East are the most extensive and populous, and probably also the most valuable and important, that any people ever acquired beyond its own natural bounda

cient times attracted a large share of the interest of the rest of the civilized world; but it has special claims to be regarded with interest by the people of modern England. The thoughtful portion of the English people cannot but feel deeply impressed with the strength of those claims and with the weight of the responsibilities arising out of the peculiar relation in which England stands to India. It cannot be supposed that India has been given to us for no other purpose than our national aggrandizement. It must surely have been, mainly and ultimately, for the benefit of India itself that so great and populous a country was committed to our care, that we might impart to it the bene-ries. India alone, not including Ceylon, fit of our just laws, our rational liberty, Burma, or the eastern settlements, comour mental enlightenment, and our pro- prises upwards of a million and a half of gressive civilization. And if this be ad- square miles, an area which is nearly mitted, we must admit more. We must equal to that of Europe; and though admit that it was intended we should en- nearly two-thirds of the soil are uncultideavour to impart to it also a knowledge vated, so thickly peopled are the cultiof that religion which has made our own vated districts, that the population of nation what it is, and without which no India was estimated in 1872 as amountnation can ever become free, happy, or ing to nearly three hundred millions, permanently great. Our duty as a Chris- which is more than equal to the populatian nation to promote not only the mate- tion of the corresponding area in Europe, rial welfare of the people of India, but and which constitutes probably more than also, as far as it is possible for us, their a fourth, certainly more than a fifth, of moral and religious welfare, is becoming the whole population of the globe. Nomore and more widely recognized, in pro- where, except in China, is there a field of portion as our intercourse with India in-missions so vast as that which India precreases. A remarkable amount of inter-sents; and in no other part of the world est in the progress of Christianity in In--certainly not in China - is there to be dia has recently been awakened, and a found so varied a field. In proportion to the variety is the interest; but in proportion to the interest is the difficulty.

1. Statement exhibiting the Moral and Material

Progress and Condition of India during the Year

1871-2: presented to Parliament by her Majesty's Secretary of State for India, and ordered by the House of Commons to be printed. London, 1873.

2. Indian Missions. By Sir Bartle Frere, G.C.S.I., &c., late Governor of Bombay. Reprinted from "The Church and the Age." London, 1873.

3. Lecture on Missions, delivered in Westminster

Abbey on December 3rd, 1873. By Max Müller, M.A.,
Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford; with an
Introductory Sermon by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley,
D.D., Dean of Westminster. London, 1873.

4. Report of the General Missionary Conference held at Allahabad, 1872-3. London, 1873.

5. Statistical Tables of Protestant Missions in India, Ceylon, and Burma for 1871. Prepared at the request of the Calcutta Missionary Conference. Cal

cutta, 1873.

It might not be too much to say that the work of propagating Christianity in India is the most difficult work in which the Christian Church has ever been engaged. Some of the difficulties that formerly existed have, it is true, disappeared, and the strength of some has diminished. Others, again, are still very formidable.

There is one difficulty less now than in the days when Christian missions were first introduced into India. The opposition of the Indian government has disappeared. Scarcely two generations have

elapsed since the Indian government | India, and ordered by the House of Comceased to refuse permission to missiona- mons to be printed. It is entitled, "A ries to labour in India, and scarcely one Statement exhibiting the Moral and Mageneration has elapsed since it ceased terial Progress of India during the Year openly to patronize idolatry. It adminis- 1871-2," and a considerable portion of tered the affairs of all the principal pago- the statement is devoted to a survey of das, and required its Christian servants existing missions in India. This portion to do honour to pagan festivals. It was of the book evinces an enlightened intercommonly said at that time that it was est in the progress of Indian missions, impossible to convert the Hindus, and considered with reference to their bearsome of the people who said so did their ing on the intellectual and moral adbest to fulfil their own predictions. The vancement of the people. Probably no Indian government has always professed such utterance on the subject of Christo observe a strict neutrality between the tian missions ever before proceeded from various religions professed by its sub- any government, and what renders it jects; but until a comparatively recent specially encouraging to all who take any period the neutrality it observed was a interest in that work is that, as it is based one-sided neutrality, which showed itself on statistics and official information, its mainly in the encouragement of the in- impartiality cannot reasonably be called digenous religions and in opposition to in question. Christianity. We have reason to be We are not of opinion that the governthankful as a nation that a very different ment system of education in India can state of things now prevails. The gov-fairly be regarded as hostile to Chrisernment still indeed professes to hold a tianity or to the work of missions, though neutral position, and in certain particu- we are unable to regard it as a perfect lars it is desirable that it should always system. We do not see how any system continue to do so. No man should be fa- of education can be regarded as perfect voured, no man should be molested, on which ignores the emotional part of account of his religion; all religious pro- man's nature, which ignores a divinelyfessions should be equal before the law. sanctioned morality, which ignores religBut this neutrality is now no longer ion. Probably the government itself regarded as inconsistent with the re- does not consider its system as perfect, pression of crimes committed in the but only holds it to be the best that is name of religion, with the protection possible under the circumstances. It is of converts to Christianity in the en- an important consideration that the govjoyment of their civil rights, or with an ernment makes grants in aid on a liberal enlightened, prudent solicitude for the scale to missionary schools and colleges. peaceful diffusion of the blessings of At one time, indeed, it refused grants to i Christian civilization and morals. The such institutions in one of the presidenIndian government moves forward slow-cies, but that ill-advised policy has been ly, but it keeps constantly moving, it abandoned; and if the missionary societakes no step backwards; and hence, ties, or other associations of persons unnotwithstanding its characteristic cau- connected with government, were to set tion, the caution necessary to its posi-themselves to promote the education of tion, perhaps there is scarcely any gov- the people on a larger scale, larger funds ernment in the world that has achieved a would doubtless be provided by governgreater aggregate of progress within the ment to aid them in their undertaking. memory of the present generation, espe- The teaching in the schools and colleges cially in regard to educational and social entirely supported and managed by govreforms. This statement receives a re- ernment is restricted to secular subjects; markable illustration from one of the but though to this extent it is non-Chrisworks contained in the list prefixed to tian, it is certainly not the intention or this article, a document presented to wish of government that it should be Parliament by the secretary of state for anti-Christian; and if in any particular