For

They have few rules but much enthusiasm, the best of good fellowship prevails, and the sight may well give food for serious reflection to our politicians, whose thoughts, it may be, seldom turn to sport. here there is something more than a mere phase of sport. This eager play is the symbol of the influence that prevails to break down the barriers of race, and bind together in amity the fellow-subjects of the East and West.

Every thoughtful man who has spent any time in our Indian empire must have been struck with the yawning chasm that divides the Englishman and the native. The social standards of these classes are indeed widely different, and each regards the ways and customs of the other with the contempt born of utter lack of comprehension. Both the habits and social amusements of the Englishman are ridiculous to the native, whose names for our picnics and fancy dress balls, known to him as the fool's dinner (pagal khana) and the fool's dance (pagali nautch), are typical of his attitude of mind towards them; while few need to be reminded of the lordly scorn of our fellow-countrymen for the ways of those whose misfortune it is not only to be born of another nation, but that nation a dark-skinned one.

Yet daily and hourly in the official life of that vast country these two classes meet, and the whole machinery of Government depends on their amicable and loyal co-operation. Our statesmen, both at home and in India,

are alive to the necessity of bridging over, if possible, the dividing chasm, and many and various methods have been tried. These have been honestly carried out by those for whose benefit they were framed, but with what result? Native gentlemen, whose pride of race is as their very life-blood, and who are accustomed to the ready deference of their inferiors, have attended the At Homes of our governors, and stood in silent discomfort in scenes in which they felt they were out of place, and where their dignity was overshadowed by that of a higher power. Englishmen of position have gone to native entertainments, and have sat with wreaths of roses twined round their necks and wrists, trying to look neither bored nor foolish under the infliction, and succeeding but poorly in the attempt. Each class has endeavoured to be polite and to conceal his boredom at the incomprehensible foolishness of the other; and if the Asiatic has on the whole succeeded best, this is to be attributed to his superior power of adaptability.

Then it was thought that if the bond of union was not to be found in social intercourse, it might perchance be discovered on the common ground of literature. Universities must be provided; and when the native mind had absorbed Western culture, it would run in the same groove as that of the educated Englishman. But what has in effect been the result of the crowd of M.A.'s and B.A.'s turned out by the Universities of Calcutta, Bombay,

and Lahore? An acute Oxford tutor once replied to a question as to whether a certain man would or would not get "a first" by an emphatic "No; he looks on his work as 'lessons,' and will not get more than a second." Now this just touches the root of our failure to combine culture with education in our training of the youthful Asiatic. With him Shakespeare and Scott are "lessons," which he obediently crams, but which teach him little and affect him not at all. At the end of his university career the fine flavour of an Oxford culture is as much unknown to him as when he attended his first lecture; and our failure has taught us that, educate the Eastern as we may, it is not thus we shall teach him to look at things from our own social or literary standpoint.

But where the LieutenantGovernor and the professor have failed, quite another person has had no small share of success. The subaltern, whose knowledge is too often chiefly cram, and whose highest ambition is to get into the service somehow, even if he should be the last to pass into or out of Sandhurst, has opened a way of union where the highest diplomatic and scholarly minds have failed. In the simple love of sport that distinguishes him, he has struck a vein in the native character which all his superiors have failed to reach. On the polo - field the native forgets to be stiff and the Englishman to be haughty, and under the influence of their common love for a manly exercise they each discover that

their adversary is a good fellow and generous opponent, and thus a sure foundation for future friendly intercourse is laid.

Not only do we see the wildest of the frontier men forgetting their tribal hatreds and jealousies in a tournament organised by the English Resident and his subordinates at Gilgit, but in our great military cantonments English and native teams meet, and find the strongest of social bonds in doing so. No better example

of this can be found than during the Christmas week at Mian Mir, when our troops are in their winter quarters; and Lahore, only four miles distant, will turn out its large European and native population almost to a man to see a polo-match at the cantonments. On the ground you will see conveyances of all sorts and colours and dimensions, from the lordly barouche of the LieutenantGovernor, with its scarletliveried servants and wellgroomed horses, down to the tiny country ekka, the lightest and most ingenious of primitive structures, which will carry a surprising load of slim, lightly clad natives. There, too, will be the native prince, driving a four-in-hand with much showy plated harness, the effect of which to an English eye is almost sure to be marred by one or more breakages having been made good with odd fragments of string; and the fat bunniah, who looks on from the hired gharry, and who very likely has lent his Highness the Nawab the money wherewith to buy his resplendent team of

greys. Smart English officers, pale civilians, and Eurasians, who unite the blood of East and West, and have no part or lot with either, are all filled with the interest of the moment.

The final of the polo tournament is to be played between the junior officers of a wellknown cavalry regiment and a Sikh team from Patiala. Both sides are well mounted, the natives using mostly Arabs, with here and there a waler, or a wiry, nervous-eyed countrybred. One and all of the ponies are trained to perfection, and they will gallop, stop, and turn with a grace and rapidity that will astonish those who do not know the time and money that have been lavished on them. The Englishmen's ponies are rather bigger and more powerful, for they have greater weights to carry, not a dragoon among the players getting up under 12 stone, while most are heavier. The four clean-looking subalterns are typical Englishmen, using the term to include the representatives of the Sister Isle. There is a son of the land, of the Church, of the factory, and of the army itself among them, and Galway, Ulster, Kent, and Sussex are the counties represented. The Sikhs are lithe, brownskinned, and black - bearded, and their young chief appears in the neatest of English boots and breeches, though with the native turban on his head.

of it, and the goals mount up rapidly on their side. The element of danger is by no means wanting in a fast game on an Indian ground, for a fall on that hard sun-baked soil is almost certain death; but the players are soldiers, and they think of nothing but the chances of the game. Long before time is up the Sikhs have won; but the Englishmen play doggedly on, hitting as hard and galloping as fast to add one more goal to their score, as though that goal would mean victory. When the last bell rings, the two sides ride off together, laughing and talking as easily as though no difference of race and colour divided them.

The pace of the game is tremendous, and it is soon seen that the lighter and more active Sikhs, with their bettertrained animals, have the best

Later in the year, when these young officers will be the guests of the Sikh prince at his palace, the good feeling engendered by their friendly rivalry on the polo-field make their relations cordial, and they will together play polo and billiards, and hunt the great grey boar, and talk of it all together afterwards in the truest spirit of comradeship. Do we not see here that the real solvent of race distinctions in India is to be found in sport, and that in giving our native fellow-subjects our love for our manly outdoor recreations, we insensibly draw closer to them and they to us?

The late Chester Macnaghten, who was the most successful of

any in imparting Western culture and civilisation to the lads placed under his care, recognised the power of sport. The boys of the Rajkomar College were

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encouraged to play cricket and tennis, and to join in coursing parties made up by the European residents at Rajkote, and none rode harder or threw themselves more heartily into the pursuit of the hour than did these young native noblemen. It was the Rajkomar College at Rajkote that gave us Ranjitsinhji, than whom there is no better example of the fusion of East and West in a single personality. And though Ranjitsinhji is in some ways an exceptional character, there are hundreds who have been brought into sympathy with us by their early associations with cricket or football, or one of the many of our favourite outdoor diversions.

Any and all athletic games and every kind of sport will prove a happy meeting-ground for us and the Asiatics, whose social ways we may never be able fully to understand; and it

[June

is by these that important classes of the natives will be won over to respect and even to like us. But while all kinds of sport and physical exercise, in which there must be an element of danger that appeals to the innate love of glory of the better-class native, are useful as a means of union, polo in India will always be the sport par excellence. As in its origin it is Eastern, it is suited to the climate and the people, and will catch hold of the native mind as our national pastimes of football or cricket will never do. And as in this country in the hunting-field all men are equal, on the Indian polo-field race differences are forgotten, and the English aliens and countryborn natives learn to recognise their opponents, not only as men, but as fellow - members of the great sport-loving community throughout the world. T. F. DALE.