THE AGRICULTURAL DANGER
I believe it to be an axiom in politics that all social convulsions
have been preceded by a period of growing misery for the
agricultural poor, combined with the growing intelligence of the
urban populations. Certainly this was the case in Europe at the
time of the Reformation, and again, following the lead of France,
in the last century; and, most certainly and immediately under our
own observation, it has been the case in Ireland and in Egypt at
the present day. Where there is complete ignorance, misery may be
accumulated almost without limit by a despotic power. Where the
mass of the population is prosperous, no growth of knowledge need
be feared. But it is at the point where education and starvation
meet that the flame breaks forth. This is a truism. Yet there are
few who recognize how absolutely true it is of India.
No one accustomed to Eastern travel can fail to see how poor the
Indian peasant is. Travelling by either of the great lines of
railway which bisect the Continent, one need hardly leave one’s
carriage to be aware of this. From Madras to Bombay, and from
Bombay again to the Ganges valley, distances by rail of seven
hundred and eight hundred miles, one passes not half a dozen
towns, nor a single village which has a prosperous look. The
fields, considering the general lightness of the soil, are not
ill-cultivated; but there is much waste land; and in the scattered
villages there is an entire absence of well-built houses, enclosed
gardens, or large groves of fruit trees, the signs of individual
wealth which may be found in nearly every other Oriental country.
The houses are poorer than in Asia Minor or Syria, or even Egypt,
and are uniform in their poverty. There are no residences of any
wealthier class than the poorest, and the little congregations of
mud huts are without redeeming feature in the shape of stone-built
mansion or whitewashed dwelling at all superior to the rest.
Such exceptions one finds in every province of the Ottoman
Empire, except perhaps in Irak, and one finds them in Persia. But
throughout the great central plateau of the Indian peninsula, they
are wholly absent.
Nor is the aspect of poverty less startling if one looks closer.
Entering a Deccan[14] village one is confronted with peasants
nearly naked, and if one asks for the head man, one finds him no
better clothed than the rest. The huts are bare of furniture;
the copper pots are rare; the women are without ornaments. These
are the common signs of indigence in the East; and here they are
universal. Questioning the peasants, one ascertains not only that
they do not eat meat, for this is often against their religious
custom, but also that they eat rice itself only on holidays. Their
ordinary food is millet mixed with salt and water, and flavoured
with red peppers; and of this they partake only sufficient to
support life. Of luxuries other than the red peppers they seem
entirely destitute.
In every village which I visited of the British Deccan I heard
complaints of poverty resembling most closely those to which I
was accustomed in Syria and Egypt--complaints of over-taxation of
the country, of increase and inequalities of assessment, of the
tyranny of local overseers (not necessarily Englishmen) charged
with levying the rates, complaints of the forest laws, of the
decrease of the stock of working cattle, of their deterioration
through the price of salt, of universal debt to the usurers.
The only complaints conspicuous from their absence were those
relating to insecurity of life and to conscription, the two great
evils of Western Asia. And I will say at once before I go further
that immunity on these heads goes far in my opinion towards
counterbalancing the miseries which our rule would otherwise seem
to have aggravated in the condition of the Indian ryot.
The special evils which we have imposed upon him are, however,
only too apparent. In former days, though his land assessment or
rent was very likely as high as now, it was mitigated for him by
custom and by certain privileges which our system of administration
has deprived him of. In bad seasons when his crop was poor he
enjoyed remissions which are very seldom granted now. The lord
of the land to whom he paid his rent lived within reach of him,
and in days of distress might be cajoled into pity or possibly
frightened into moderation. But the landlord now is a formless
thing--the Government--which no tears can reach, no menace turn
away. It is represented only by a succession of changing agents,
strangers to the country, ignorant of the people and their wants,
and whose names the ryots rarely learn to know. This is a constant
complaint in their mouths, and the condition of British India under
the modern system is a striking instance of the evils of absentee
ownership. For the last hundred years it has been the constant
aim of the Madras Government to destroy all ownership in land but
its own, and it has so far succeeded that it stands now alone
throughout the greater portion of the Presidency face to face with
the peasantry. If these were happy the result might be good. But in
their actual circumstances of chronic starvation it seems to me a
very dangerous one.
With regard to the actual amount of the assessment, I made what
inquiries I was able, endeavouring, so far as possible, to
ascertain what proportion it bore to the gross value of the crop,
and, although I state it with all due diffidence, I think I am not
wrong in putting it at 35 to 40 per cent. for the Deccan district.
It may well be considerably more, but I think it can hardly be
less. In any case, I feel quite certain that Dr. Hunter’s figures
in his book (which, be it remembered, is the accepted handbook
about India) are enormously wrong, where, quoting the Famine
Commission, he states that “the land tax throughout British India
is from 3 per cent. to 7 per cent. on the gross out-turn.” Seven
per cent. would of course be a very light rent in any country, but
40 per cent. would be inordinately high, and I am quite sure that
impartial inquiry would prove that, in the Deccan at least, my own
figures are far more nearly correct. In Bengal, I know there are
lands assessed as low as 1 per cent.; but Bengal is a prosperous
country, nearly the only one in British India, and is precisely the
exception which best proves the general rule by exemplifying the
causes of agricultural poverty.
It is, however, not merely the amount of the assessment which
weighs upon these Deccan ryots, nor merely the inelasticity of its
collection. If the natives themselves are to be believed, there
are other causes of poverty directly due to the British connection
which have had a far more disastrous effect upon the prosperity
of the country than any taxation has produced. The reason, these
say, why the ryot of the present day is poorer than his predecessor
of fifty years ago is this. Under the ancient system of native
rule, and during the early days of the Company, the agricultural
population was not wholly dependent on agriculture. It had certain
home industries which employed its leisure during those seasons
of the year when labour in the fields was useless. There was the
carrying trade which could be engaged in with the bullocks used at
other times for ploughing. There was peddling of ghee and other
home-made wares; and above all there was the weaving industry,
which employed the women, and the men too during their idle time,
and helped them to pay their rent. But modern improvements and
modern legislation have altered all this. The railroads have very
much destroyed the carrying trade; native industries have been
supplanted by foreign ones, and the introduction of machinery
and of foreign cottons has broken up every hand-loom in the
country. The ryot, therefore, is reduced to the simple labour of
his fields, and this does not suffice him any longer to live and
to pay his assessment--therefore he starves. This account of the
matter has been very ably set before the English public by Sir
William Wedderburn, and I do not propose to argue it out here. But
I can testify that it is the account also given by the natives
themselves, and that I have no doubt that it is strictly true.
The official account is different. According to apologists of the
Strachey school, over-population caused by the security of our rule
is the sufficient reason of all distress, and it is possible that
this may be correct of Bengal and other districts enjoying more
prosperous conditions than those of which I am now speaking. But as
applied to the Deccan it is manifestly untrue. For nothing like
the whole area of cultivable land is taken up, and the population
is scanty rather than excessive. The causes of distress and famine
must be looked for rather in the growing impoverishment of the
existing population, than in its numerical excess--in its enforced
idleness during part of the year, and in the disappearance of the
whole class of large proprietors who in former times used to lay
up stores of grain to keep their peasantry alive in the droughts.
It is my opinion, in common with that of the most intelligent
native economists, that a permanent settlement of the revenue,
such as there is in Bengal, would do more by the creation of a
wealthy class of landowners in the Deccan, towards mitigating the
periodical famines there, than any other form of legislation could,
or the covering of the country with a whole network of railroads.
Other modern grievances of the peasant are, first, the new Forest
Laws. These were introduced some years ago in consequence of
the growing famines which, it was argued, were caused by the
irregularity of the monsoon rains, which in their turn were caused
by the denudation of the forests. Admitting as true all that can
be said of the necessity of strong measures to prevent destruction
in these, and to increase the area of vegetation, the _modus
operandi_ seems to have been needlessly violent, and most injurious
to the people. One would have supposed that so wide an object as
the regulation of the rainfall would have been provided for out of
Imperial funds. But this was only done in part. The bulk of the
loss fell on individual peasants. Wherever I went in the Madras and
Bombay presidencies I heard of common lands enclosed and rights
of pasture withdrawn, and this without any compensation at all
being given to the possessors. The plea seems to have been that,
in the days of the Mohammedan Empire, the Mogul was lord of all
uncultivated lands, and that therefore, although time and custom
had intervened for generations, the land might be resumed. The
effect in any case has been disastrous. The leaves of trees are
largely used in India for manure, and the supply is now cut off.
The pasture has been reduced and cattle are dying of hunger. Where
wood had been free from time immemorial, so much a load now has to
be paid. In the Ghauts of Bombay matters seem to have gone farther
still, and after the great famine of 1877-78 Sir Richard Temple
had whole districts enclosed, evicting the ryots and destroying
their villages. The ryots in turn set fire to the forests, and but
for his timely resignation of office it is said the whole country
would have been morally and physically in a blaze. I know that
the ill-feeling caused by his high-handed action--which reminds
one of that attributed to William Rufus when he enclosed the New
Forest--has left behind it memories bitter as those in Ireland to
this day. Bad or good, necessary or unnecessary, the Forest Act has
much to answer for in the present state of discontent among the
peasantry.
Allied to this, and even more general in its pressure on the poor,
stands, secondly, the Salt tax. Its oppressive character has been
much disputed; but in the Madras Deccan and the poorer districts
of Bombay there should be no doubt whatever upon the matter. It is
the one great theme of complaint, the one that touches the people
most nearly and is most injurious in proportion to the poverty of
the sufferer by it. The comparatively well-to-do ryot of Bengal and
North-Western India does not feel it and does not complain of it.
But wherever there is real pinching in the necessities of life,
there the salt monopoly raises a clamorous cry. It is only the very
poor who are obliged to stint themselves in salt; but the very poor
are, unfortunately, the rule in Southern India. In the Deccan,
moreover, its pressure is more galling, because natural salt lies
on the ground, and the people are therefore starved of it as it
were in sight of plenty. In several villages which I passed the
ryots told me that they had been reduced to driving their cattle
by night to the places where salt is found, that they may lick it
by stealth; but the guards impound them if thus caught infringing
the law; and latterly orders have been given that the police should
collect in heaps and destroy all salt whatever found in its natural
state above ground. In other parts I heard of a kind of leprosy
attacking persons deprived of this necessary article of diet; and
especially on the sea-coast south of Bombay the disease was spoken
of as prevalent. The fact of there being no complaint with regard
to the salt tax at Calcutta or in Northern India, has caused the
Indian Government to be callous in this matter, and I fear the
fact that it brings six millions sterling to the revenue is an
additional reason why it is likely still to be overlooked. But it
is one that is nevertheless very urgent in the poorer districts,
where it is causing real and increasing suffering, and where it is
regarded with well-founded anger. The price of salt sold to the
people by the Government is reckoned at from 1200 to 2000 per cent.
on its cost value.
Lastly, and this is the case all over British India, the peasantry
is deeply, hopelessly in debt. It is curious to find this prime
cause of the Egyptian Revolution faithfully reproduced in India
under our own paternal and enlightened rule, and through the
same causes. Agricultural debt came into being in either case
with European methods of finance; and, although the subject has
been thoroughly threshed out by previous writers, I shall perhaps
be pardoned if I once more briefly explain the process. In old
times, as I understand the case, in Oriental lands money was
practically unknown to the peasantry. Their dealings were in kind,
and especially the land tax paid to the Government was paid not in
coin but in corn. The whole of the peasants’ security, therefore,
if they wanted to borrow, was their crop--and, if at sowing-time
they needed seed, it was recoverable only at the harvest; at
which time also the Government took its share--a tenth according
to strict Mohammedan law, or it might be a fifth, or in times of
grievous tyranny the half. Nothing more, however, than the crop of
the year was forthcoming. No lender, therefore, would advance the
impecunious cultivator more than his seed corn or the loan of a
yoke of oxen, and there was no possibility on the Government’s part
of anticipating the taxes. The economic law of ancient Asia was to
do things parsimoniously, to spend according to the means in hand,
and at most to store up wealth for rainy, or rather rainless, days.
But with European administration came other doctrines. Wealth,
our economists affirmed, must not be idle; production must be
increased; resources must be developed; capital must be thrown into
the land. The revenue, above all things, must be made regular and
secure. In order to effect this, payment in money was substituted
for payment in kind, a regular tax for an irregular portion of
the crop;--and, while the rate was nominally lowered, no loss
from accidental circumstances was to be allowed to fall upon the
Government. So much coin must be forthcoming every year as the
tax on so many acres. In countries like England where the system
is understood, where markets are at hand, and money plentiful,
this is undoubtedly the best and most convenient form of levying
the revenue. But in the East its introduction has always produced
disorder. In the country districts of India, as in Egypt, corn
could not be sold in the public market at its full market price,
and, when the day came for payment of the Government dues, the
peasant had the choice either of selling at a grievous loss or of
borrowing the money. He generally borrowed. I believe it may be
stated absolutely that the whole of peasant indebtedness in either
country originally came from the necessity thus imposed of finding
coin to pay the land tax.
The change, however, put immediate wealth into the hands of
Government, by lessening the cost of collecting the revenue, and so
was approved as a beneficial one; and by an inevitable process of
financial reasoning borrowing was encouraged. It was argued that
capital, if thrown into the land, would increase the wealth of the
agriculturist along with the wealth of the revenue. But how induce
the investment of that capital except by increasing its security?
In order to enable the agriculturist to borrow, he must be able to
give his debtor something of more value than the crop in his field.
Then why not the field itself? The laws of mortgage and recovery
of debt by safe and easy process were consequently introduced, and
courts appointed for the protection of creditors. This completed
the peasant’s ruin. Finding money suddenly at his disposal, he
borrowed without scruple, not only to pay taxes and to improve his
land, but also for his amusements. Whether I am right or wrong in
the details of this history, it is an indisputable fact that at the
present moment there is hardly a village in British India which is
not deeply, hopelessly in debt. In the course of my inquiries I do
not remember to have met with a single instance of a village clear
of debt even in Bengal.
This is the last worst evil which English administration has
brought upon the Indian peasantry, and when one considers all their
poverty and the depth of their increasing liabilities one finds
it difficult to have patience with the optimist views of men like
Sir John Strachey, who see all that they have created in India and
find it very good. That we have done much that is of advantage to
agricultural India no one will deny, but have we not done it still
more harm? We have given the ryot security from death by violence,
but we have probably increased his danger of death by starvation.
This is a doubt which is beginning to assert itself vividly in the
minds of thoughtful Indians, and it is one that Englishmen too will
do well, before it is too late, to entertain.
Admitting, then, the general fact of India’s growing agricultural
poverty, what should be our remedy? I confess to being a little
sceptical of the legislative nostrums partially applied and
proposed to be applied by the Imperial Government to a patient
manifestly in want of a complete change of treatment and a long
period of financial rest. Nor do I see my way to accepting
such alleviations as the Bengal Rent Bill, or the founding of
agricultural banks, or even local self-government, though all
these things may be good, as a sufficient check to the evils fast
accumulating. At best they may succeed in shifting the burdens of
the people a little on this side or on that. They will not lighten
them really by a single pennyweight, nor restore the confidence of
the people in the humane intentions of the Government, nor put off
even for a year the trouble which on the present lines of policy
must certainly ensue. I do not believe in legislative remedies
for the starvation of the ryot or in the possibility of relieving
his position except at the sacrifice of interests too strongly
represented both at Calcutta and in London to be assailed with any
chance of success. Finance, not legislature, is the cause of all
the evil; and until that is put upon a sound footing, the rest is
of no real value.
When I was at Calcutta, I constantly discussed this matter with
the leading native economists, and I know, too, their ideas
in other cities; and at Bombay it formed the chief subject of
attention at the meeting specially convened to instruct me with
regard to the wants of the Presidency. I know, therefore, what
Indians think about Indian finance, and I believe their reasoning
is sound. According to these, the vice of the Calcutta budgets
lies in the fact that, whereas in every other country the finance
Minister looks solely to the interests of the country he serves,
in India he looks principally to the interests, not of India,
but of England. Two English interests have to be served first,
before any attention can be paid to the necessities of those who
supply the revenue. First, the Anglo-Indian Administration must be
maintained in full employment, in pay, allowances, and according
to native ideas in luxuries; and secondly, every kind of advantage
must be given to English trade. It is unnecessary for me to argue
out the question of the excessive costliness of the civil and
military establishments of India. These are notorious in the world
as surpassing those of all other countries to which they can be
fairly compared in the present time or the past. And, although they
may also lay claim to be the most efficient, it does not prevent
them from being a vast financial failure.
It is a perpetual astonishment to travellers to note the
scale of living of every Englishman employed in India, in
however mean a capacity. The enormous palaces of governors and
lieutenant-governors, their country houses, their residences in
the hills, their banquets and entertainments, their retinues of
servants, their carriages and horses, their special trains on
their journeyings, their tents, their armies of retainers and camp
followers--these are only samples of the universal profusion; an
equally noble hospitality reigns in every bungalow on the plains;
and endless dinners of imported delicacies, with libations of
imported wines, tempt night after night the inhabitants of the
most solitary stations to forget the dismal fact that they are in
Asia and far from their own land. No Collector’s wife will wear an
article of Indian manufacture to save her soul from perdition, and
all her furniture, even to her carpets, must be of English make.
I remember early in my travels having the good fortune to enjoy the
hospitality of a country station-master on the Indian Peninsular
Railway, and being astonished to find him living in better style,
and in a house larger than most English rectories, while we were
driven out after luncheon by his lady in a charming phaeton drawn
by a pair of stepping ponies. There was no reason, however, for
astonishment. He lived as all Englishmen in India do, that is to
say, about five times as well as in his rank of life he possibly
could do at home, and he was worthy of his good fortune. Only it
must not be supposed that the natives starving outside are at all
proportionately the better for the brave living of their rulers. I,
an English traveller, profited as a guest, and I am half ashamed
to say how sumptuously I fared. But the poor ryot was, in fact, my
host--not the other--for it was he whose labour fed me, though he
did not share the meal.
I say, a traveller cannot fail to be impressed, and, if he have
any powers of reflection, disagreeably so, with this profusion.
There is surely no country in the world where in the midst of such
starvation there is so much waste; certainly none where the expense
of it all is borne so wholly and directly by the poor. I wonder
whether any one has calculated the number of miles of macadamized
road in the various Anglo-Indian cantonments, not a yard of which
has ever served any purpose beyond that of enabling the officers’
wives to pay each other visits in their carriages? I wonder whether
any one has calculated the numbers of absolutely useless clock
towers and Gothic memorials erected by Sir Richard Temples to Sir
Bartle Freres, and Sir Bartle Freres to Sir Richard Temples in
the various Presidencies? I wonder whether any one has calculated
how many hogsheads of champagne the water-drinking ryot has paid
for in the last half-century as an unaccounted item of his yearly
budget? These things strike the imagination of the traveller. They
do not strike the resident in India. They are not arguments, but
impressions; and yet they mean something.
If, however, the ryot must maintain the luxury of his English
administrators before his own wants can be supplied, so, too, must
he maintain the English trader to the ruin of his own trade. I
am repeating native arguments when I complain that the necessity
of considering the advantage of Manchester capitalists stands
seriously in the way of an honest framer of the Indian Budget, and
that, whereas the Finance Minister of every English colony is at
liberty to raise money by import duties and generally does so, the
Indian Minister is precluded from that source of revenue. I have
argued the matter of Free Trade out with the native economists,
and they seem to me perfectly to understand it. They know that
as applied to England, a manufacturing country which imports its
food, Free Trade is considered a necessity of financial life. But
they deny that the doctrine applies with equal cogency to India.
India, they say, is a produce-exporting country like the United
States or the Australian colonies. It imports no single article of
prime necessity, iron and coal perhaps excepted, and the cotton and
other manufactured goods consumed there are luxuries only used by
the rich, and especially by the Europeans. It is certain that no
ryot in all India wears any cotton clothing of foreign make, or has
his means of existence made one wit cheaper for him by Free Trade.
Import duties, then, would tax the rich only, and the rich in India
are hardly taxed at all. Yet, because Free Trade is of advantage
to England, India must forgo her own advantage. This, the natives
say, may be a political necessity, but it is not ruling India
financially for India’s good. I confess I do not see where the flaw
in their argument lies.
They say, moreover, that Free Trade in manufactured goods has
destroyed the native industries and given nothing in their stead.
When the hand-looms a hundred years ago were ruined in the English
counties, the rural population migrated to the towns and found
work in the great factories. But in India this has hardly at
all happened. The ryot who used to weave is left without labour
of any sort during his spare time, for distances are great and
there is little demand for labour in the towns, and he remains of
necessity idle, so that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion
that a present of his labour has been made by Anglo-Indian finance
to his English rival. The doctrine of advantage from buying in the
cheapest market does not help him, for he buys nothing cheaper;
and if the English manufacturer shares the advantage with any
one in India, it is with the town consumer, not with the ryot.
Every native economist, therefore, whom I have spoken with on the
subject, would impose import duties on manufactured articles except
machinery. Thus, they say, a tax would be levied upon the rich; and
if it acted as a protection and stimulus to home manufactures, why,
so much the better. With protection, factories could be established
in the Indian country towns in which the surplus labour of the
ryot would find employment, and so the injury done him be in part
redressed. If this doctrine is unsound, I shall be glad to hear in
what manner; for at present it seems to me to have not a little
reason.[15]
I was surprised to find, in an assemblage mainly of rich men, that
most of those who composed the Bombay meeting already alluded to
were in favour of some form of income tax. Not that they altogether
denied its general unpopularity, but from the necessity they
recognized of taxing wealth. They said that in one shape or other
incomes had always till recently been taxed in India, and that,
though there were great difficulties in the way of collecting
any sort of income tax fairly, it had always been accepted. The
present licence tax, they assured me, was much more hateful and
far less profitable than any true tax on income, and seemed framed
on purpose to distribute its pressure most unfairly. It seemed
hardly credible, but according to present regulations the keeper
of a small shop in the native quarter was taxed as highly for his
trade as the richest English banker on ’Change; all the charge
upon the latter’s income, though he might deal in millions, being
twenty pounds per annum in the form of a trade licence. The present
system was, in fact, only another advantage given by the framers
of Indian budgets to English trade; and they assured me that the
people who really prevented a proper income tax from being imposed
in India were not the native tradesmen, but the English officials
whose salaries would be directly touched by it. If it were possible
to levy import duties and a tax on incomes, the agricultural poor
might be relieved, but hardly in any other way. I offer these
suggestions for what they may be considered worth.
The prime measure, however, of agricultural reform, on which all
native India seems agreed, is the granting of a permanent revenue
settlement to every province, such as was ninety years ago granted
to Bengal, and limiting thereby the preposterous claim of the
Government to all ownership in land. This right of State ownership
has worked everywhere, or nearly everywhere, its full natural
result of impoverishment and disaffection; and Bengal, which has
been exempted from its action, has alone remained prosperous. I do
not propose to argue out this great question here. But I intend to
return to it on a future occasion; and it will be sufficient for
me now to say, that the value placed by native opinion on a fixed
revenue settlement is the cause of the strong agitation actually
in progress against the Bengal Rent Bill. This measure, in spite
of Lord Ripon’s immense popularity, is decidedly unpopular, and
native politicians see in it a first blow struck at the prosperity
of the only province which has hitherto escaped the universal drain
of wealth into the Imperial coffers; nor am I without reason to
believe that so it was intended, not by Lord Ripon, but by some of
his advisers. At present, however, I only state the fact that a
permanent settlement of the land revenue is urgently demanded by
all India.[16]
To sum up, Indian economists are in favour, first, of import duties
on manufactured goods such as are imposed in Australia and other
colonies; secondly, of a shifting of the financial burden as far
as possible from the agricultural poor to the commercial rich; and
thirdly, of a renunciation by the Government of its indefinite
claims upon the land. These views will probably be considered
preposterous in England, where we have cut-and-dried principles of
economy in contradiction to them. But it is certain that all native
opinion is against us, and that our present system is bringing
India very near to ruin. Surely, there must be something wrong in a
state of things which has produced the spectacle of a Government,
after having absorbed to itself the whole land rent of a country,
still finding itself constantly in financial shifts. The Government
of India, as landlord, does practically nothing for the land. All
is squandered and spent on other things; and the people who till
the soil are yearly becoming poorer and more hopeless. This I call
the agricultural danger, and if it is not one I again ask where
the flaw in my reasoning lies. At least it is a reasoning held by
ninety-nine out of every hundred educated and intelligent Indians.
_Note._--Since this was published, in 1884, some reduction, as
already stated, has been made in the iniquitous salt tax; but
most of the other economic evils still prevail, some of them in
an exaggerated form. No attempt has been made, by the imposition
of import duties, to re-create the lost native industries, nor
has any permanent settlement of the land revenue been granted,
notwithstanding the example of its astonishing success in
restoring agricultural prosperity under very similar conditions
in Egypt. Famines continue to be attributed by Viceroy after
Viceroy, not to their true economic causes, but to the “act of
God” in withholding the rain, which in spite of the forest laws
is still in periodical default. Imperial expenditure has not been
lessened, nor has the burden of personal debt on the ryot’s back
been relieved. He is still the rack-rented tenant of an absentee
state-landlord throughout the greater part of British India.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] I include in the term “Deccan” the whole geographical area of
the central and southern plateau of India; not merely the Nizam’s
territory.
[15] Since this was written factories especially for cotton goods
have been established by native enterprise in Bombay, but have been
met in the interests of Lancashire by measures designed to limit
their competition with imported goods. Lord Cromer with the same
object imposed “countervailing excise duties” in Egypt.
[16] It was, I believe, a maxim of Sir John Strachey’s that, in
the interests of Finance, the Bengal Settlement must by hook or by
crook be rescinded.