POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY 253

estates and administer their ancestral laws, surrounded
by nobles who never transgress the strict rules of etiquette,
 and betray no hankering after the fascinations of
foreign cities. This is a phase of Indian society that the
Englishman in India hardly sees; but it is the most picturesque
 phase, and in many ways the most interesting.
Amongst the smaller native chiefs there is often the wish
for a reputation as men of the advanced world which
includes western sport and many western vices, but not
the means to maintain it; and one may find most ludicrous
 attempts at imitation of this unattainable Europeanism
 in their surroundings. They are nearly all
sportsmen—these minor nawabs and rajahs—and in the
matter of arms and ammunition there is usually nothing
wanting in their equipment. They have, moreover, all
of them (whatever position they occupy in the scale of
precedence) learnt the value of game preservation; and it
is not possible now to find any considerable area of
jungle country over which the European sportsman can
range at his own will in Rajputana or Central India;
though there are still thousands of square miles of unwholesome
 jungle in the southern districts of the Central
Provinces and in Madras where he would be right
welcome.
The disadvantages of too liberal an English education
are often illustrated by those chiefs and nobles whq have
so completely adopted the fashions of the western foreigner
that they are no longer in touch with their own people.
There are some (and they are amongst the best known of
Indian princes) who do not conceal the fact that their
social sympathies are with the European rather than with
the native. They even occasionally marry white girls of
an inferior class, thereby raising up an extensive field for
domestic intrigue, if not for actual crime, amongst those
who are interested in the question of succession. They
wear European clothes, adopt European habits and manners,
 and draw a line between themselves and the people
they are expected to govern and whose interests should
be identical with their own. All this cannot possibly