CHAPTER XII.

HOW SLAVERY GROWS IN INDIA.

In no part of the world has there existed the same tendency to

voluntary association, the distinguishing mark of freedom, as in

India. In none have the smaller communities been to the same extent

permitted the exercise of self-government. Each Hindoo village had its

distinct organization, and under its simple and "almost patriarchal

arrangements," says Mr. Greig,[62]--

"The natives of Hindoostan seem to have lived from the earliest,

down, comparatively speaking, to late times--if not free from the

troubles and annoyances to which men in all conditions of society are

more or less subject, still in the full enjoyment, each individual,

of his property, and of a very considerable share of personal

liberty. * * * Leave him in possession of the farm which his

forefathers owned, and preserve entire the institutions to which he

had from infancy been accustomed, and the simple Hindoo would give

himself no concern whatever as to the intrigues and cabals which took

place at the capital. Dynasties might displace one another;

revolutions might recur; and the persons of his sovereigns might

change every day; but so long as his own little society remained

undisturbed, all other contingencies were to him subjects scarcely of

speculation. To this, indeed, more than to any other cause, is to be

ascribed the facility with which one conqueror after another has

overrun different parts of India; which submitted, not so much

because its inhabitants were wanting in courage, as because to the

great majority among them it signified nothing by whom the reins of

the supreme government were held. A third consequence of the village

system has been one which men will naturally regard as advantageous

or the reverse, according to the opinions which they hold, touching

certain abstract points into which it is not necessary to enter here.

Perhaps there are not to be found on the face of the earth, a race of

human beings whose attachment to their native place will bear a

comparison with that of the Hindoos. There are no privations which

the Hindoo will hesitate to bear, rather than voluntarily abandon the

spot where he was born; and if continued oppression drive him forth,

he will return to it again after long years of exile with fresh

fondness."

The Mohammedan conquest left these simple and beautiful institutions

untouched. "Each Hindoo village," says Col. Briggs, in his work on the

land tax--

"Had its distinct municipality, and over a certain number of

villages, or district, was an hereditary chief and accountant, both

possessing great local influence and authority, and certain

territorial domains or estates. The Mohammedans early saw the policy

of not disturbing an institution so complete, and they availed

themselves of the local influence of these officers to reconcile

their subjects to their rule. * * * From the existence of these local

Hindoo chiefs at the end of six centuries in all countries conquered

by the Mohammedans, it is fair to conclude that they were cherished

and maintained with great attention as the key-stone of their civil

government. While the administration of the police, and the

collection of the revenues, were left in the hands of these local

chiefs, every part of the new territory was retained under military

occupation by an officer of rank; and a considerable body of

Mohammedan soldiers.* * * In examining the details of Mohammedan

history, which has been minute in recording the rise and progress of

all these kingdoms, we nowhere discover any attempt to alter the

system originally adopted. The ministers, the nobles, and the

military chiefs, all bear Mohammedan names and titles, but no account

is given of the Hindoo institutions, being subverted, or Mohammedan

officers, being employed in the minor, details, of the civil

administration.

"It would appear from this that the Moslems, so far from imposing

their own laws upon their subjects, treated the customs of the latter

with the utmost respect; and that they did so because experience

taught them that their own interests were advanced by a line of

policy so prudent."

Local action and local combination are everywhere conspicuous in the

history of this country. With numerous rulers, some of whom to a

greater or less extent acknowledged the superiority of the Sovereign

of Delhi, the taxes required for their support were heavy, but they

were locally expended, and if the cultivator contributed too large a

portion of his grain, it was at least consumed in a neighbouring

market, and nothing went from off the land. Manufactures, too, were

widely spread, and thus was made a demand for the labour not required

in agriculture. "On the coast of Coromandel," says Orme,[63] "and in

the province of Bengal, when at some distance from a high road or

principal town, it is difficult to find a village in which every man,

woman, and child is not employed in making a piece of cloth. At

present," he continues, "much the greatest part of whole provinces are

employed in this single manufacture." Its progress, as he says,

"includes no less than a description of the lives of half the

inhabitants of Indostan." While employment was thus locally

subdivided, tending to enable neighbour to exchange with neighbour,

the exchanges between the producers of food, or of salt, in one part

of the country and the producers of cotton and manufacturers of cloth

in another, tended to the production of commerce with more distant

men, and this tendency was much increased by the subdivision of the

cotton manufacture itself. Bengal was celebrated for the finest

muslins, the consumption of which at Delhi, and in Northern India

generally, was large, while the Coromandel coast was equally

celebrated for the best chintzes and calicoes, leaving to Western

India the manufacture of strong and inferior goods of every kind.

Under these circumstances it is no matter of surprise that the country

was rich, and that its people, although often overtaxed, and sometimes

plundered by invading armies, were prosperous in a high degree.

Nearly a century has now elapsed since, by the battle of Plassey,

British power was established in India, and from that day local action

has tended to disappear, and centralization to take its place. From

its date to the close of the century there was a rapidly increasing

tendency toward having all the affairs of the princes and the people

settled by the representatives of the Company established in Calcutta,

and as usual in such cases, the country was filled with adventurers,

very many of whom were wholly without principle, men whose sole object

was that of the accumulation of fortune by any means, however foul, as

is well known by all who are familiar with the indignant denunciations

of Burke.[64]

England was thus enriched as India was impoverished, and as

centralization was more and more established.

Step by step the power of the Company was extended, and everywhere was

adopted the Hindoo principle that the sovereign was proprietor of the

soil, and sole landlord, and as such the government claimed to be

entitled to one-half of the gross produce of the land. "Wherever,"

says Mr. Rickards, long an eminent servant of the Company,

"The British power supplanted that of the Mohammedans in Bengal, we

did not, it is true, adopt the sanguinary part of their creed; but

from the impure fountain of their financial system, did we, to our

shame, claim the inheritance to a right to seize upon half the gross

produce of the land as a tax; and wherever our arms have triumphed,

we have invariably proclaimed this savage right: coupling it at the

same time with the senseless doctrine of the proprietary right to

these lands being also vested in the sovereign, in virtue of the

right of conquest."--_Rickards's India_, vol. i, 275.

Under the earlier Mohammedan sovereigns, this land-tax, now

designated as rent, had been limited to a thirteenth, and from that

to a sixth of the produce of the land; but in the reign of Akber

(16th century) it was fixed at one-third, numerous other taxes being

at the same time abolished. With the decline and gradual dissolution

of the empire, the local sovereigns not only increased it, but

revived the taxes that had been discontinued, and instituted others

of a most oppressive kind; all of which were continued by the

Company, while the land-tax was maintained at its largest amount.

While thus imposing taxes at discretion, the Company had also a

monopoly of trade, and it could dictate the prices of all it had to

sell, as well as of all that it needed to buy; and here was a further

and most oppressive tax, all of which was for the benefit of absentee

landlords.

With the further extension of power, the demands on the Company's

treasury increased without an increase of the power to meet them; for

exhaustion is a natural consequence of absenteeism, or

centralization, as has so well been proved in Ireland. The people

became less able to pay the taxes, and as the government could not be

carried on without revenue, a permanent settlement was made by Lord

Cornwallis, by means of which all the rights of village proprietors,

over a large portion of Bengal, were sacrificed in favour of the

Zemindars, who were thus at once constituted great landed proprietors

and absolute masters of a host of poor tenants, with power to punish

at discretion those who were so unfortunate as not to be able to pay

a rent the amount of which had no limit but that of the power to

extort it. It was the middleman system of Ireland transplanted to

India; but the results were at first unfavourable to the Zemindars,

as the rents, for which they themselves were responsible to the

government, were so enormous that all the rack-renting and all the

flogging inflicted upon the poor cultivators could not enable them to

pay; and but few years elapsed before the Zemindars themselves were

sold out to make way for another set as keen and as hard-hearted as

themselves. That system having failed to answer the purpose, it was

next determined to arrest the extension of the permanent settlement,

and to settle with each little ryot, or cultivator, to the entire

exclusion of the village authorities, by whom, under the native

governments, the taxes had uniformly been so equitably and

satisfactorily distributed. The Ryotwar system was thus established,

and how it has operated may be judged from the following sketch,

presented by Mr. Fullerton, a member of the Council at Madras:--

"Imagine the revenue leviable through the agency of one hundred

thousand revenue officers, collected or remitted at their discretion,

according to the occupant's means of paying, whether from the produce

of his land or his separate property; and in order to encourage every

man to act as a spy on his neighbour, and report his means of paying,

that he may eventually save himself from extra demand, imagine all

the cultivators of a village liable at all times to a separate demand

in order to make up for the failure of one or more individuals of the

parish. Imagine collectors to every county, acting under the orders

of a board, on the avowed principle of destroying all competition for

labour by a general equalization of assessment, seizing and sending

back runaways to each other. And, lastly, imagine the collector the

sole magistrate or justice of the peace of the county, through the

medium and instrumentality of whom alone any criminal complaint of

personal grievance suffered by the subject can reach the superior

courts. Imagine, at the same time, every subordinate officer employed

in the collection of the land revenue to be a police officer, vested

with the power to fine, confine, put in the stocks, and flog any

inhabitant within his range, on any charge, without oath of the

accuser, or sworn recorded evidence of the case."[65]

Any improvement in cultivation produced an immediate increase of

taxation, so that any exertion on the part of the cultivator would

benefit the Company, and not himself. One-half of the gross produce

[66] may be assumed to have been the average annual rent, although, in

many cases it greatly exceeded that proportion. The Madras Revenue

Board, May 17th, 1817, stated that the "conversion of the government

share of the produce (of lands) is in some districts, as high as 60 or

70 per cent. of the whole."[67]

It might be supposed that, having taken so large a share of the gross

produce, the cultivator would be permitted to exist on the remainder,

but such is not the case. Mr. Rickards gives [68] a list of sixty

other taxes, invented by the sovereigns, or their agents, many of

which he states to exist at the present day. Those who have any other

mode of employing either capital or labour, in addition to the

cultivation of their patches of land, as is very frequently the case,

are subject to the following taxes, the principle of which is

described as _excellent_ by one of the collectors, December 1st,

1812:--

"The Veesabuddy, or tax on merchants, traders, and shopkeepers;

Mohturfa, or tax on weavers, cotton cleaners, shepherds, goldsmiths,

braziers, ironsmiths, carpenters, stone-cutters, &c.; and Bazeebab,

consisting of smaller taxes annually rented out to the

highest-bidder. The renter was thus constituted a petty chieftain,

with power to exact fees at marriages, religious ceremonies; to

inquire into and fine the misconduct of females in families, and

other misdemeanours; and in the exercise of their privileges would

often urge the plea of engagements to the Cirkar (government) to

justify extortion. The details of these taxes are too long to be

given in this place. The reader, however, may judge of the operation

and character of all by the following selection of one, as described

in the collector's report:--'The mode of settling the Mohturfa on

looms hitherto has been very minute; every circumstance of the

weaver's family is considered, the number of days which he devotes to

his loom, the number of his children, the assistance which he

receives from them, and the number and quality of the pieces which he

can turn out in a month or year; so that, let him exert himself as he

will, his industry will always be taxed to the highest degree.' This

mode always leads to such details that the government servants cannot

enter into it, and the assessment of the tax is, in consequence, left

a great deal too much to the Curnums of the villages. No weaver can

possibly know what he is to pay to the Cirkar, till the demand come

to be made for his having exerted himself through the year; and

having turned out one or two pieces of cloth more than he did the

year before, though his family and looms have been the same, is made

the ground for his being charged a higher Mohturfa, and at last,

instead of a professional, it becomes a real income tax."[69]

The following will show that no mode of employing capital is allowed

to escape the notice of the tax-gatherer:--

"The reader will, perhaps, better judge of the inquisitorial nature

of one of these surveys, or pymashees, as they are termed in Malabar,

by knowing that upward of seventy different kinds of buildings--the

houses, shops, or warehouses of different castes and

professions--were ordered to be entered in the survey accounts;

besides the following 'implements of professions' which were usually

assessed to the public revenue, viz.:

"Oil-mills, iron manufactory, toddy-drawer's stills, potter's kiln,

washerman's stone, goldsmith's tools, sawyer's saw, toddy-drawer's

knives, fishing-nets, barber's hones, blacksmith's anvils, pack

bullocks, cocoa-nut safe, small fishing-boats, cotton-beater's bow,

carpenter's tools, large fishing-boats, looms, salt storehouse."[70]

"If the landlord objected to the assessment on trees as old and past

bearing, they were, one and all, ordered to be cut down, nothing

being allowed to stand that did not pay revenue to the state. To

judge of this order, it should be mentioned that the trees are

valuable, and commonly used for building, in Malabar. To fell all the

timber on a man's estate when no demand existed for it in the market,

and merely because its stream of revenue had been drained, is an odd

way of conferring benefits and protecting property."[71]

"Having myself," says Mr. Rickards, "been principal collector of

Malabar, and made, during my residence in the province, minute

inquiries into the produce and assessments of lands, I was enabled to

ascertain beyond all doubt, and to satisfy the revenue board at

Madras, that in the former survey of the province, which led to the

rebellion, lands and produce were inserted in the pretended survey

account which absolutely did not exist, while other lands were

assessed to the revenue at more than their actual produce."[72]

"Fifty per cent. on the assessment is allowed," says Mr.

Campbell,[73] "as a reward to any informer of concealed cultivation,

&c.; and it is stated that there are, 'in almost every village,

dismissed accountants desirous of being re-employed, and unemployed

servants who wish to bring themselves to notice,' whose services as

informers can be relied on."

A system like this, involving the most prying supervision of the

affairs of each individual, and in which, in settling the tax to be

paid, "the collector takes into consideration the number of children

[74] to be supported, makes the poor ryot a mere slave to the

collector, and with the disadvantage that the latter has no pecuniary

interest in the preservation of his life, whereas the death of a

slave, who constitutes a part of the capital of his owner, is a severe

loss."

The tendency thus far has been, as we see, to sweep away the rights

not only of kings and princes, but of all the native authorities, and

to centralize in the hands of foreigners in Calcutta the power to

determine for the cultivator, the artisan, or the labourer, what work

he should do, and how much of its products he might retain, thus

placing the latter in precisely the position of a mere slave to people

who could feel no interest in him but simply as a tax-payer, and, who

were represented by strangers in the country, whose authority was

everywhere used by the native officers in their employ, to enable them

to accumulate fortunes for themselves.

The poor manufacturer, as heavily taxed as the cultivator of the

earth, found himself compelled to obtain advances from his employers,

who, in their turn, claimed, as interest, a large proportion of the

little profit that was made. The Company's agents, like the native

merchants, advanced the funds necessary to produce the goods required

for Europe, and the poor workmen are described as having been "in a

state of dependence almost amounting to servitude, enabling the

resident to obtain his labour at his own price."[75]

In addition to the taxes already described, a further one was

collected at local custom-houses, on all exchanges between the several

parts of the country; and to these were again added others imposed by

means of monopolies of tobacco and opium, and of salt, one of the most

important necessaries of life. The manufacture of coarse salt from the

earth was strictly prohibited.[76] The salt lakes of the upper country

furnish a supply so great that it is of little value on the spot;[77]

but these lakes being even yet in the possession of native princes,

the monopoly could then, and can now, be maintained only by aid of

strong bands of revenue officers, whose presence renders that which is

almost worthless on one side of an imaginary line so valuable on the

other side of it that it requires the produce of the sixth part of the

labour of the year to enable the poor Hindoo to purchase salt for his

family. Along the seashore salt is abundantly furnished by nature, the

solar heat causing a constant deposition of it; but the mere fact of

collecting it was constituted an offence punishable by fine and

imprisonment, and the quantity collected by the Company's officers was

limited to that required for meeting the demand at a monopoly price,

all the remainder being regularly destroyed, lest the poor ryot should

succeed in obtaining for himself, at cost, such a supply as was needed

to render palatable the rice which constituted almost his only food.

The system has since been rendered less oppressive, but even now the

duty is ten times greater than it was under enlightened Mohammedan

sovereigns.[78]

Such being the mode of collecting the revenue, we may now look to its

distribution. Under the native princes it was, to a great extent,

locally-expended, whereas, under the new system, all the collections

by government or by individuals tended to Calcutta, to be there

disposed of. Thence no inconsiderable portion of it passed to England,

and thus was established a perpetual drain that certainly could not be

estimated at less than four millions of pounds sterling per annum, and

cannot be placed, in the last century, at less than four hundred

millions of pounds, or two thousand millions of dollars.

The difference between an absentee landlord expending at a distance

all his rents, and a resident one distributing it again among his

tenants in exchange for services, and the difference in the value of

the products of the land resulting from proximity to market, are so

well exhibited in the following passage from a recent work on India,

that the reader cannot fail to profit by its perusal:--

"The great part of the wheat, grain, and other exportable land

produce which the people consume, as far as we have yet come, is

drawn from our Nerbudda districts, and those of Malwa which border

upon them; and _par consequent_, the price has been rapidly

increasing as we recede from them in our advance northward. Were the

soil of those Nerbudda districts, situated as they are at such a

distance from any great market for their agricultural products, as

bad as it is in the parts of Bundelcund that I came over, no net

surplus revenue could possibly be drawn from them in the present

state of arts and industry. The high prices paid here for land

produce, arising from the necessity of drawing a great part of what

is consumed from such distant lands, enables the Rajahs of these

Bundelcund states to draw the large revenue they do. These chiefs

expend the whole of their revenue in the maintenance of public

establishments of one kind or other; and as the essential articles of

subsistence, _wheat_ and _grain, &c._, which are produced in their

own districts, or those immediately around them, are not sufficient

for the supply of these establishments, they must draw them from

distant territories. All this produce is brought on the backs of

bullocks, because there is no road from the districts whence they

obtain it, over which a wheeled carriage can be drawn with safety;

and as this mode of transit is very expensive, the price of the

produce, when it reaches the capitals, around which these local

establishments are concentrated, becomes very high. They must pay a

price equal to the collective cost of purchasing and bringing this

substance from the most distant districts, to which they are at any

time obliged to have recourse for a supply, or they will not be

supplied; and as there cannot be two prices for the same thing in the

same market, the wheat and grain produced in the neighbourhood of one

of these Bundelcund capitals, fetch as high a price there as that

brought from the most remote districts on the banks of the Nerbudda

river; while it costs comparatively nothing to bring it from the

former lands to the markets. Such lands, in consequence, yield a rate

of rent much greater compared with their natural powers of fertility

than those of the remotest districts whence produce is drawn for

these markets or capitals; and as all the lands are the property of

the Rajahs, they draw all these rents as revenue.

"Were we to take this revenue, which the Rajahs now enjoy, in tribute

for the maintenance of public establishments concentrated at distant

seats, all these local establishments would of course be at once

disbanded; and all the effectual demand which they afford for the raw

agricultural produce of distant districts would cease. The price of

the produce would diminish in proportion; and with it the value of

the lands of the districts around such capitals. Hence the folly of

conquerors and paramount powers, from the days of the Greeks and

Romans down to those of Lord Hastings and Sir John Malcolm, who were

all bad political economists, supposing that conquered and ceded

territories could always be made to yield to a foreign state the same

amount of gross revenue they had paid to their domestic government,

whatever their situation with reference to the markets for their

produce--whatever the state of their arts and their industry--and

whatever the character and extent of the local establishments

maintained out of it. The settlements of the land revenue in all the

territories acquired in central India during the Mahratta war, which

ended, in 1817, were made upon the supposition, that the lands would

continue to pay the same rate of rent under the new, as they had paid

under the old government, uninfluenced by the diminution of all local

establishments, civil and military, to one-tenth of what they had

been; that, under the new order of things, all the waste lands must

be brought into tillage; and be able to pay as high a rate of rent as

before tillage; and, consequently, that the aggregate available net

revenue must greatly and rapidly increase! Those who had the making

of the settlements, and the governing of these new territories, did

not consider that the diminution of every _establishment_ was the

removal of a _market_--of an effectual demand for land produce; and

that when all the waste lands should be brought into tillage, the

whole would deteriorate in fertility, from the want of fallows, under

the prevailing system of agriculture, which afforded the lands no

other means of renovation from over cropping. The settlements of the

land revenue which were made throughout our new acquisitions upon

these fallacious assumptions, of course failed. During a series of

quinquennial settlements, the assessment has been everywhere

gradually reduced to about two-thirds of what it was when our rule

began; and to less than one-half of what Sir John Malcolm, and all

the other local authorities, and even the worthy Marquis of Hastings

himself, under the influence of their opinions, expected it would be.

The land revenues of the native princes of central India, who reduced

their public establishments, which the new order of things seemed to

render useless, and thereby diminished their only markets for the raw

produce of their lands, have been everywhere falling off in the same

proportion; and scarcely one of them now draws two-thirds of the

income he drew from the same lands in 1817.

"There are in the valley of the Nerbudda, districts that yield a

great deal more produce every year than either Orcha, Jansee, or

Duteea; and yet, from the want of the same domestic markets, they do

not yield one-fourth of the amount of land revenue. The lands are,

however, rated equally high to the assessment, in proportion to their

value to the farmers and cultivators. To enable them to yield a

larger revenue to government, they require to have larger

establishments as markets for land produce. These establishments may

be either public, and paid by government, or they may be private, as

manufactories, by which the land produce of these districts would be

consumed by people employed in investing the value of their labour in

commodities suited to the demand of distant markets, and more

valuable than land produce in proportion to their weight and bulk.

These are the establishments which government should exert itself to

introduce and foster, since the valley of the Nerbudda, in addition

to a soil exceedingly fertile, has in its whole line, from its source

to its embouchure, rich beds of coal reposing for the use of future

generations, under the sandstone of the Sathpore and Vindhya ranges;

and beds no less rich of very fine iron. These advantages have not

yet been justly appreciated; but they will be so by and by."[79]

From the concluding lines of this extract the reader will see that

India is abundantly supplied with fuel and iron ore, and that if she

has not good machinery, the deficiency is not chargeable to nature. At

the close of the last century cotton abounded, and to so great an

extent was the labour of men, women, and children applied to its

conversion into cloth, that, even with their imperfect machinery, they

not only supplied the home demand for the beautiful tissues of Dacca

and the coarse products of Western India, but they exported to other

parts of the world no less than 200,000,000 of pieces per annum.[80]

Exchanges with every part of the world were so greatly in their favour

that a rupee which would now sell for but 1s. 10d. or 44 cents, was

then worth 2s. 8d. or 64 cents. The Company had a monopoly of

collecting taxes in India, but in return it preserved to the people

the control of their domestic market, by aid of which they were

enabled to convert their rice, their salt, and their cotton, into

cloth that could be cheaply carried to the most remote parts of the

world. Such protection was needed, because while England prohibited

the export of even a single collier who might instruct the people of

India in the mode of mining coal--of a steam engine to pump water or

raise coal, or a mechanic who could make one--of a worker in iron who

might smelt the ore--of a spinning-jenny or power-loom, or of an

artisan who could give instruction in the use of such machines--and

thus systematically prevented them from keeping pace with improvement

in the rest of the world,--she at the same time imposed very heavy

duties on the produce of Indian looms received in England. The day was

at hand, however, when that protection was to disappear. The Company

did not, it was said, export sufficiently largely of the produce of

British industry, and in 1813 the trade to India was thrown open--_but

the restriction on the export of machinery and artisans was maintained

in full force_; and thus were the poor and ignorant people of that

country exposed to "unlimited competition," with a people possessed of

machinery ten times more effective than their own, while not only by

law deprived of the power to purchase machinery, but also of the power

of competing in the British market with the produce of British looms.

Further than this, every loom in India, and every machine calculated

to aid the labourer, was subject to a tax that increased with every

increase in the industry of its owner, and in many cases absorbed the

whole profit derived from its use.[81] Such were the circumstances

under which the poor Hindoo was called upon to encounter, unprotected,

the "unlimited competition" of foreigners in his own market. It was

freedom of trade all on one side. Four years after, the export of

cottons from Bengal still amounted to £1,659,994,[82] but ten years

later it had declined to £285,121; and at the end of twenty years we

find a whole year pass by without the export of a single piece of

cotton cloth from Calcutta, the whole of the immense trade that

existed but half a century since having disappeared. What were the

measures used for the accomplishment of the work of destroying a

manufacture that gave employment and food to so many millions of the

poor people of the country, will be seen on a perusal of the following

memorial, which shows that while India was denied machinery, and also

denied access to the British market, she was forced to receive British

cottons free of all duty:--

_"Petition of Natives of Bengal, relative to Duties on Cotton and

Silk._

"Calcutta, 1st Sept. 1831.

"To the Right Honourable the Lords of His Majesty's Privy Council for

Trade, &c.

"The humble Petition of the undersigned Manufacturers and Dealers in

Cotton and Silk Piece Goods, the fabrics of Bengal;

"SHOWETH--That of late years your Petitioners have found their

business nearly superseded by the introduction of the fabrics of

Great Britain into Bengal, the importation of which augments every

year, to the great prejudice of the native manufacturers.

"That the fabrics of Great Britain are consumed in Bengal, without

any duties being levied thereon to protect the native fabrics.

"That the fabrics of Bengal are charged with the following duties

when they are used in Great Britain--

"On manufactured cottons, 10 per cent. On manufactured silks,

24 per cent.

"Your Petitioners most humbly implore your Lordships' consideration

of these circumstances, and they feel confident that no disposition

exists in England to shut the door against the industry of any part

of the inhabitants of this great empire.

"They therefore pray to be admitted to the privilege of British

subjects, and humbly entreat your Lordships to allow the cotton and

silk fabrics of Bengal to be used in Great Britain 'free of duty,' or

at the same rate which may be charged on British fabrics consumed in

Bengal.

"Your Lordships must be aware of the immense advantages the British

manufacturers derive from their skill in constructing and using

machinery, which enables them to undersell the unscientific

manufacturers of Bengal in their own country: and, although your

Petitioners are not sanguine in expecting to derive any great

advantage from having their prayer granted, their minds would feel

gratified by such a manifestation of your Lordships' good-will toward

them; and such an instance of justice to the natives of India would

not fail to endear the British government to them.

"They therefore confidently trust that your Lordships' righteous

consideration will be extended to them as British subjects, without

exception of sect, country, or colour.

"And your Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray."

[Signed by 117 natives of high respectability.]

The object sought to be accomplished would not have, however, been

attained by granting the prayer of this most reasonable and humble

petition. When the export of cotton, woollen, and steam machinery was

prohibited, it was done with a view of compelling all the wool of the

world to come to England to be spun and woven, thence to be returned

to be worn by those who raised it--thus depriving the people of the

world of all power to apply their labour otherwise than in taking from

the earth cotton, sugar, indigo, and other commodities for the supply

of the great "workshop of the world." How effectually that object has

been accomplished in India, will be seen from the following facts.

From the date of the opening of the trade in 1813, the domestic

manufacture and the export of cloth have gradually declined until the

latter has finally ceased, and the export of raw cotton to England has

gradually risen until it has attained a height of about sixty millions

of pounds,[83] while the import of twist from England has risen to

twenty-five millions of pounds, and of cloth, to two hundred and sixty

millions of yards; weighing probably fifty millions of pounds, which,

added to the twist, make seventy-five millions, requiring for their

production somewhat more than eighty millions of raw cotton. We see

thus that every pound of the raw material sent to England is returned.

The cultivator receives for it one penny, and when it returns to him

in the form of cloth, he pays for it from one to two shillings, the

whole difference being absorbed in the payment of the numerous

brokers, transporters, manufacturers, and operatives, men, women, and

children, that have thus been interposed between the producer and the

consumer. The necessary consequence of this has been that everywhere

manufactures have disappeared. Dacca, one of the principal seats of

the cotton manufacture, contained 90,000 houses, but its trade had

already greatly fallen off even at the date of the memorial above

given, and its splendid buildings, factories, and churches are now a

mass of ruins and overgrown with jungle. The cotton of the district

found itself compelled to go to England that it might there be twisted

and sent back again, thus performing a voyage of 20,000 miles in

search of the little spindle, because it was a part of the British

policy not to permit the spindle anywhere to take its place by the

side of the cultivator of cotton.

The change thus effected has been stated in a recent official report

to have been attended with ruin and distress, to which "no parallel

can be found in the annals of commerce." What were the means by which

it was effected is shown in the fact that at this period Sir Robert

Peel stated that in Lancashire, _children_ were employed fifteen and

seventeen hours per day during the week, and on Sunday morning, from

six until twelve, cleaning the machinery. In Coventry, ninety-six

hours in the week was the time usually required; and of those

employed, many obtained but 2s. 9d.--66 cents--for a week's wages. The

object to be accomplished was that of underworking the poor Hindoo,

and driving him from the market of the world, after which he was to be

driven from his own. The mode of accomplishment was that of cheapening

labour and enslaving the labourer at home and abroad.

With the decline of manufactures there has ceased to be a demand for

the services of women or children in the work of conversion, and they

are forced either to remain idle, or to seek employment in the field;

and here we have one of the distinguishing marks of a state of

slavery. The men, too, who were accustomed to fill up the intervals of

other employments in pursuits connected with the cotton manufacture,

were also driven to the field--and all demand for labour, physical or

intellectual, was at an end, except so far as was needed for raising

rice, indigo, sugar, or cotton. The rice itself they were not

permitted to clean, being debarred therefrom by a duty double that

which was paid on paddy, or rough rice, on its import into England.

The poor grower of cotton, after paying to the government

seventy-eight per cent.[84] of the product of his labour, found

himself deprived of the power to trade directly with the man of the

loom, and forced into "unlimited competition" with the better

machinery and almost untaxed labour of our Southern States; and

thereby subjected to "the mysterious variations of foreign markets" in

which the fever of speculation was followed by the chill of revulsion

with a rapidity and frequency that set at naught all calculation. If

our crops were small, his English customers would take his cotton; but

when he sent over more next year, there had, perhaps, been a good

season here, and the Indian article became an absolute drug in the

market. It was stated some time since, in the House of Commons, that

one gentleman, Mr. Turner, had thrown £7000 worth of Indian cotton

upon a dunghill, because he could find no market for it.

It will now readily be seen that the direct effect of thus

_compelling_ the export of cotton from India was to increase the

quantity pressing on the market of England, and thus to lower the

price of all the cotton of the world, including that required for

domestic consumption. The price of the whole Indian crop being thus

rendered dependent on that which could be realized for a small surplus

that would have no existence but for the fact that the domestic

manufacture had been destroyed, it will readily be seen how enormous

has been the extent of injury inflicted upon the poor cultivator by

the forcible separation of the plough and the loom, and the

destruction of the power of association. Again, while the price of

cotton is fixed in England, there, too, is fixed the price of cloth,

and such is the case with the sugar and the indigo to the production

of which these poor people are forced to devote themselves; and thus

are they rendered the mere slaves of distant men, who determine what

they shall receive for all they have to sell, and what they shall pay

for all they require to purchase. Centralization and slavery go thus

always hand in hand with each other.

The ryots are, as we see, obliged to pay sixteen or eighteen pence for

the pound of cotton that has yielded them but one penny; and all this

difference is paid for the labour of other people while idle

themselves.

"A great part of the time of the labouring population in India is,"

says Mr. Chapman,[85] "spent in idleness. I don't say this to blame

them in the smallest degree. Without the means of exporting heavy and

crude surplus agricultural produce, and with scanty means, whether of

capital, science, or manual skill, for elaborating on the spot

articles fitted to induce a higher state of enjoyment and of industry

in the mass of the people, they have really no inducement to exertion

beyond that which is necessary to gratify their present and very

limited wishes; those wishes are unnaturally low, inasmuch as they do

not afford the needful stimulus to the exercise requisite to

intellectual and moral improvement; and it is obvious that there is

no remedy for this but extended intercourse. Meanwhile, probably the

half of the human time and energy of India runs to mere waste. Surely

we need not wonder at the poverty of the country."

Assuredly we need not. They are idle perforce. With indifferent means

of communication, their cotton and their food _could readily travel in

the form of cloth_, and they could consume liberally of food and

clothing; but they find themselves now forced to export every thing in

its rudest form, and this they are to do in a country that is almost

without roads. The manner in which these raw products now travel may

be seen on a perusal of the following passage from the London

_Economist_:--

"The cotton is brought on oxen, carrying 160 pounds each, at the

extreme rate, in fair weather, of seven miles a day for a

continuance, and at a price of about 5s. for each hundred miles. If

we take the average distance to Mirzapore at 500 miles, each pound of

cotton costs in transit alone above 2-1/2 d. It has thence to be

borne by water-carriage nearly 800 miles farther on to Calcutta. * * *

The great cotton-growing districts are in the northern portion of

the Peninsula, embracing Guzerat, and a vast tract called the Deccan,

lying between the Satpoora range of hills and the course of the

Kishna River. General Briggs says--'The cotton from the interior of

the country to the coast at Bombay occupies a continuous journey of

from one to two months, according to the season of the year; while in

the rains the route is wholly impassable, and the traffic of the

country is at a stand.'

"In the absence of a defined road, even the carriers, with their

pack-cattle, are compelled to travel by daylight, to prevent the loss

of their bullocks in the jungles they have to pass through, and this

under a burning sun of from 100 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The droves

of oxen are never so few as one hundred, and sometimes exceed a

thousand. Every morning after daylight each animal has to be saddled,

and the load lifted on him by two men, one on each side; and before

they are all ready to move the sun has attained a height which

renders the heat to an European oppressive. The whole now proceeds at

the rate of about two miles an hour, and seldom performs a journey of

more than eight miles; but, as the horde rests every fourth day, the

average distance is but six miles a day. If the horde is overtaken by

rain, the cotton, saturated by moisture, becomes heavy, and the black

clayey soil, through which the whole line of road lies, sinks under

the feet of a man above the ankle, and under that of a laden ox to

the knees.

"In this predicament the cargo of cotton lies sometimes for weeks on

the ground, and the merchant is ruined."

"So miserably bad," says another writer, "are the existing means of

communication with the interior, that many of the most valuable

articles of produce are, _for want of carriage and a market, often

allowed to perish on the farm_, while the cost of that which found

its way to the port was enormously enhanced; but the quantity did not

amount to above 20 per cent. of the whole of the produce, the

remainder of the articles always being greatly deteriorated."

It will scarcely be difficult now to understand why it is that cotton

yields the cultivator but a penny per pound. Neither will it be

difficult, seeing that the local manufacturers have every where been

ruined, to understand why the producer of the more bulky food is in a

condition that is even worse, now that the consumer has disappeared

from his side. If the crop is large, grain is a drug for which

scarcely any price can be obtained;[86] and if it is small, the people

perish, by thousands and ten of thousands, of famine, because, in the

existing state of the roads, there can be little or no exchange of raw

products. In the first case the cultivator is ruined, because it

requires almost the whole crop to pay the taxes. In the other he is

starved; and all this is a necessary consequence of a system that

excludes the great middle class of mechanics and other working-men,

and resolves a great nation into a mass of wretched cultivators,

slaves to a few grasping money lenders. Under such circumstances, the

accumulation of any thing like capital is impossible. "None," says

Colonel Sleeman,[87] "have stock equal to half their rent." They are

dependent everywhere, on the produce of the year, and however small

may be its amount, the taxes must be paid, and of all that thus goes

abroad nothing is returned. The soil gets nothing.[88] It is not

manured, nor can it be under a system of absenteeism like this, and

its fertility everywhere declines, as is shown by the following

extracts:--

"Formerly, the governments kept no faith with their land-holders and

cultivators, exacting ten rupees where they had bargained for five,

whenever they found the crops good; but, in spite of all this _zolm_,

(oppression,) there was then more _burkut_ (blessings from above)

than now. The lands yielded more returns to the cultivator, and he

could maintain his little family better upon five acres than he can

now upon ten.[89]

"The land requires rest from labour, as well as men and bullocks; and

if you go on sowing wheat and other exhausting crops, it will go on

yielding less and less returns, and at last will not be worth the

tilling."[90]

"There has been a manifest falling off in the returns."[91]

The soil is being exhausted, and every thing necessarily goes

backward. Trees are cut down, but none are planted; and the former

sites of vast groves are becoming arid wastes, a consequence of which

is, that droughts become from year to year more frequent.

"The clouds," says Colonel Sleeman,[92] "brought up from the southern

ocean by the south-east trade-wind are attracted, as they pass over

the island, by the forests in the interior, and made to drop their

stores in daily refreshing showers. In many other parts of the world,

governments have now become aware of this mysterious provision of

nature, and have adopted measures to take advantage of it for the

benefit of the people; and the dreadful sufferings to which the

people of those of our districts, which have been the most denuded of

their trees, have been of late years exposed from the want of rain in

due season, may, perhaps, induce our Indian government, to turn its

thoughts to the subject."

In former times extensive works were constructed for irrigating the

land, but they are everywhere going to ruin--thus proving that

agriculture cannot flourish in the absence of the mechanic arts:

"In Candeish, very many bunds [river-banks formed for purposes of

irrigation] which were kept in repair under former governments, have,

under ours, fallen to decay; nevertheless, not only has the

population increased considerably under our rule, but in 1846 or

1847, the collector was obliged to grant remission of land tax,

'because the abundance of former years lay stagnating in the

province, and the low prices of grain from that cause prevented the

ryots from being able to pay their fixed land assessment.'"[93]

We have here land abandoned and the cultivator ruined for want of a

market for food, and wages falling for want of a market for labour;

and yet these poor people are paying for English food and English

labour employed in converting into cloth the cotton produced alongside

of the food--and they are ruined because they have so many middlemen

to pay that the producer of cotton can obtain little food, and the

producer of food can scarcely pay his taxes, and has nothing to give

for cloth. Every thing tends, therefore, toward barbarism, and, as in

the olden time of England and of Europe generally, famines become

steadily more numerous and more severe, as is here shown:--

"Some of the finest tracts of land have been forsaken, and given up

to the untamed beasts of the jungle. The motives to industry have

been destroyed. The soil seems to lie under a curse. Instead of

yielding abundance for the wants of its own population, and the

inhabitants of other regions, it does not keep in existence its own

children. It becomes the burying-place of millions, who die upon its

bosom crying for bread. In proof of this, turn your eyes backward

upon the scenes of the past year. Go with me into the north-western

provinces of the Bengal presidency, and I will show you the bleaching

skeletons of five hundred thousand human beings, who perished of

hunger in the space of a few short months. Yes, died of hunger in

what has been justly called the granary of the world. Bear with me,

if I speak of the scenes which were exhibited during the prevalence

of this famine. The air for miles was poisoned by the effluvia

emitted from the putrefying bodies of the dead. The rivers were

choked with the corpses thrown into their channels. Mothers cast

their little ones beneath the rolling waves, because they would not

see them draw their last gasp and feel them stiffen in their arms.

The English in the city were prevented from taking their customary

evening drives. Jackalls and vultures approached, and fastened upon

the bodies of men, women, and children, before life was extinct.

Madness, disease, despair stalked abroad, and no human power present

to arrest their progress. _It was the carnival of death!_ And this

occurred in British India--in the reign of Victoria the First! Nor

was the event extraordinary and unforeseen. Far from it: 1835-36

witnessed a famine in the northern provinces: 1833 beheld one to the

eastward: 1822-23 saw one in the Deccan. They have continued to

increase in frequency and extent under our sway for more than half a

century."[94]

The famine of 1838 is thus described by Mr. George Thompson, late M.

P., on the testimony of a gentleman of high respectability:

"The poorer houses were entirely unroofed, the thatches having been

given to feed the cattle, which had nevertheless died; so that cattle

had disappeared altogether from the land. He says that a few

attenuated beings, more like skeletons than human creatures, were

seen hovering about among the graves of those who had been snatched

away by the famine; that desertion was everywhere visible, and that

the silence of death reigned. In one of the villages, he says, an old

man from whom they had bought a goat during their former visit, in

1833, was the only survivor of the whole community except his

brother's son, whom he was cherishing and endeavouring to keep alive,

and these two had subsisted altogether upon the eleemosynary bounty

of travellers. The courier of Lord Auckland had informed this

gentleman that when the governor-general passed through that part of

the country the roads were lined on either side with heaps of dead

bodies, and that they had not unfrequently to remove those masses of

unburied human beings, ere the governor-general could proceed onward

with his suite; and that every day from 2000 to 3000 famishing

wretches surrounded and followed the carriages, to whom he dealt out

a scanty meal; and on one occasion the horse of the courier took

fright, and on the cause being ascertained--what was it? It was found

to be the lifeless body of a man who had died with his hand in his

mouth, from which he had already devoured the fingers."[95]

The more severe the pressure on the poor ryot, the greater is the

power of the few who are always ready to profit by the losses of their

neighbours. These poor people are obliged to borrow money on their

growing crops, the prices of which are regulated by the will of the

lender rather than by the standard of the market, and the rate of

interest which the cultivators pay for these loans is often not less

than 40 or 50 per cent.

A recent traveller says of the unfortunate cultivator--

"Always oppressed, ever in poverty, the ryot is compelled to seek the

aid of the mahajun, or native money-lender. This will frequently be

the talukdhar, or sub-renter, who exacts from the needy borrower

whatever interest he thinks the unfortunate may be able to pay him,

often at the rate of one per cent. per week. The accounts of these

loans are kept by the mahajuns, who, aware of the deep ignorance of

their clients, falsify their books, without fear of detection. In

this way, no matter how favourable the season, how large the crop,

the grasping mahajun is sure to make it appear that the _whole_ is

due to him; for he takes it at his own value. So far from Mr. Burke

having overstated the case of the oppression of the ryots, on the

trial of Warren Hastings, when he said that the tax-gatherer took

from them eighteen shillings in every pound, he was really within the

mark. At the conclusion of each crop-time, the grower of rice or

cotton is made to appear a debtor to his superior, who thereupon

provided the ryot appears able to toil on for another

season--advances more seed for sowing, and a little more rice to keep

the labourer and his family from absolute starvation. But should

there be any doubt as to the health and strength of the

tenant-labourer, he is mercilessly turned from his land and his mud

hut, and left to die on the highway."

This is slavery, and under such a system how could the wretched people

be other than slaves? The men have no market for their labour, and the

women and children must remain idle or work in the field, as did, and

do, the women of Jamaica; and all because they are compelled

everywhere to exhaust the soil in raising crops to be sent to a

distance to be consumed, and finally to abandon the land, even where

they do not perish of famine. Mr. Chapman informs us that--

"Even in the valley of the Ganges, where the population is in some

districts from 600 to 800 to the square mile, one-third of the

cultivable lands are not cultivated; and in the Deecan, from which we

must chiefly look for increased supplies of cotton, the population,

amounting to about 100 to the square mile, is maintained by light

crops, grown on little more than half the cultivable land."[96]

Elsewhere he tells us that of _the cultivable surface of all India

one-half is waste_.[97] Bishop Heber informs us of the "impenetrable

jungle" that now surrounds the once great manufacturing city of Dacca;

and the Bombay Times reminds its English readers of the hundreds of

thousands of acres of rich land that are lying waste, and that might

be made to produce cotton.

When population and wealth diminish it is always the rich soils that

are first abandoned, as is shown in the Campagna of Rome, in the

valley of Mexico, and in the deltas of the Ganges and the Nile.

Without association they could never have been brought into

cultivation, and with the disappearance of the power to associate they

are of necessity allowed to relapse into their original condition.

Driven back to the poor soils and forced to send abroad the product,

their wretched cultivator becomes poorer from day to day, and the less

he obtains the more he becomes a slave to the caprices of his

landlord, and the more is he thrown upon the mercy of the

money-lender, who lends _on good security_ at three per cent. per

month, but _from him_ must have fifty or a hundred per cent. for a

loan until harvest. That under such circumstances the wages of labour

should be very low, even where the wretched people are employed, must

be a matter of course. In some places the labourer has two and in

others three rupees, or less than a dollar and a half, per month. The

officers employed on the great zemindary estates have from three to

four rupees, and that this is a high salary, is proved by the fact

that the police receive but 48 rupees ($23) per annum, out of which

they feed and clothe themselves! Such are the rewards of labour in a

country possessing every conceivable means of amassing wealth, and

they become less from year to year. "It could not be too universally

known," said Mr. Bright in the House of Commons, two years since,

"That the cultivators of the soil were in a very unsatisfactory

condition; that they were, in truth, in a condition of extreme and

almost universal poverty. All testimony concurred upon that point. He

would call the attention of the house to the statement of a

celebrated native of India, the Rajah Rammohun Roy, who about twenty

years ago published a pamphlet in London, in which he pointed out the

ruinous effects of the zemindary system, and the oppression

experienced by the ryots in the presidencies both of Bombay and

Madras. After describing the state of matters generally, he added,

'Such was the melancholy condition of the agricultural labourers,

that it always gave him the greatest pain to allude to it.' Three

years afterward, Mr. Shore, who was a judge in India, published a

work which was considered as a standard work till now, and he stated

that 'the British Government was not regarded in a favourable light

by the native population of India,'--that a system of taxation and

extortion was carried on 'unparalleled in the annals of any country.

Then they had the authority of an American planter, Mr. Finnie, who

was in India in 1840, and who spoke of the deplorable condition of

the cultivators of the soil, and stated that if the Americans were

similarly treated, they would become as little progressive as the

native Indians. He might next quote the accounts given by Mr.

Marriott in 1838, a gentleman who was for thirty years engaged in the

collection of the revenue in India, and who stated that 'the

condition of the cultivators was greatly depressed, and that he

believed it was still declining.' There was the evidence of a native

of India to which he might refer on this subject. It was that of a

gentleman, a native of Delhi, who was in England in the year 1849,

and he could appeal to the right hon. baronet the member for Tamworth

in favour of the credibility of that gentleman. He never met with a

man of a more dignified character, or one apparently of greater

intelligence, and there were few who spoke the English language with

greater purity and perfection. That gentleman had written a pamphlet,

in which he stated that throughout his whole line of march from

Bombay he found the Nizam's territories better cultivated, and the

ryots in a better state of circumstances, than were the Company's

territories, of the people residing within them, who were plunged in

a state of the greatest poverty; and he concluded his short, but

comparatively full, notice of the present deplorable state of India,

by observing that he feared this was but the prelude of many more

such descriptions of the different portions of the Company's

dominions which would be put forth before the subject would attract

the notice of those whose duty it was to remove the evils that

existed."

We have here confirmation of the correctness of the views of Colonel

Sleeman, that the condition of the people under the local governments

is better than under the great central government. Heavily as they are

taxed, a small part only of the proceeds of taxes goes, in these

cases, to Calcutta on its way to England, whereas, of the enormous

salaries paid to English governors and judges, nearly the whole must

go abroad, as no one consents to serve for a few years in India,

except on such terms as will enable him to accumulate a fortune and

return home to spend it. In further confirmation of this we have the

facts so fully given in Mr. Campbell's recent work, (Modern India,

chap, xi.,) and proving that security of person and property increases

as we pass _from_ the old possessions of the Company, and toward the

newly acquired ones. Crime of every kind, gang robbery, perjury, and

forgery, abound in Bengal and Madras, and the poverty of the

cultivator is so great that the revenue is there the least, and is

collected with the greatest difficulty--and there, too, it is that the

power of association has been most effectually destroyed. Passing

thence to the Northwestern provinces more recently acquired, person

and property become more secure and the revenue increases; but when we

reach the Punjab, which until now has been subject to the rule of

Runjeet Singh and his successors, we find that, tyrants as he and they

have been represented, the people have there been left in the exercise

of self-government. The village communities and the beautiful system

of association, destroyed in Bengal, there remain untouched. Officers

of all kinds are there more responsible for the performance of their

duties than are their fellows in the older provinces, and property and

person are more secure than elsewhere in India. Gang robbery is rare,

perjury is unfrequent, and Mr. Campbell informs us that a solemn oath

is "astonishingly binding." "The longer we possess a province," he

continues, "the more common and general does perjury become;" and we

need no better evidence than is thus furnished of the slavish tendency

of the system. The hill tribes, on the contrary, are remarkable for

their "strict veracity," and Colonel Sleeman expresses the belief that

"there is as little falsehood spoken in the village communities," as

in any part of the world with an equal area and population.[98] In the

new provinces the people read and write with facility, and they are

men of physical and moral energy, good cultivators, and understand

well both their rights and their duties; whereas from the older ones

education has disappeared, and with it all power to associate together

for any good purpose. In the new provinces, commerce is large, as is

shown by the following facts representing the population and

post-office revenue of Bengal, the N. W. Provinces, and the Punjab,

placed in the order of their acquisition by the Company:--

Population. Post-office Revenue.

----------- --------------------

Bengal................ 41,000,000 480,500 rupees.

N. W. Provinces....... 24,000,000 978,000 "

Punjab................ 8,000,000 178,000 "

We have here exhibited the remarkable fact that in the country of the

Sikhs, so long represented as a scene of grasping tyranny, eight

millions of people pay as much postage as is paid by fifteen millions

in Bengal, although in the latter is Calcutta, the seat of all the

operations of a great centralized government. That such should be the

case is not extraordinary, for the power advantageously to employ

labour diminishes with the approach to the centre of British power,

and increases as we recede from it. Idleness and drunkenness go hand

in hand with each other, and therefore it is that Mr. Campbell finds

himself obliged to state that "intemperance increases where our rule

and system have been long established."[99] We see thus that the

observations of both Mr. Campbell and Colonel Sleeman, authors of the

most recent works on India, confirm to the letter the earlier

statements of Captain Westmacott, an extract from which is here

given:--

"It is greatly to be deplored, that in places the longest under our

rule, there is the largest amount of depravity and crime. My travels

in India have fallen little short of 8000 miles, and extended to

nearly all the cities of importance in Northern, Western, and Central

India. I have no hesitation in affirming, that in the Hindoo and

Mussulman cities, removed from European intercourse, there is much

less depravity than either in Calcutta, Madras, or Bombay, where

Europeans chiefly congregate."

Calcutta grows, the city of palaces, but poverty and wretchedness grow

as the people of India find themselves more and more compelled to

resort to that city to make their exchanges. Under the native rule,

the people of each little district could exchange with each other food

for cotton or cotton cloth, paying nobody for the privilege. Now,

every man must send his cotton to Calcutta, thence to go to England

with the rice and the indigo of his neighbours, before he and they can

exchange food for cloth or cotton--and the larger the quantity they

send the greater is the tendency to decline in price. With every

extension of the system there is increasing inability to pay the

taxes, and increasing necessity for seeking new markets in which to

sell cloth and collect what are called rents--and the more wide the

extension of the system the greater is the difficulty of collecting

revenue sufficient for keeping the machine of government in motion.

This difficulty it was that drove the representatives of British power

and civilization into becoming traders in that pernicious drug, opium.

"The very best parts of India," as we are told,[100] were selected

for the cultivation of the poppy. The people were told that they must

either cultivate this plant, mate opium, or give up their land. If

they refused, they were peremptorily told they must yield or quit.

The same Company that forced them to grow opium said, You must sell

the opium to us; and to them it was sold, and they gave the price

they pleased to put upon the opium thus manufactured; and they then

sold it to trading speculators at Calcutta, who caused it to be

smuggled up the Canton River to an island called Lintin, and tea was

received in exchange. At last, however, the emperor of China, after

repeated threats, proceeded to execute summary justice; he seized

every particle of opium; put under bond every European engaged in the

merchandise of it; and the papers of to-day (1839) inform us that he

has cut off the China trade, "root and branch."

Unhappily, however, the British nation deemed it expedient to make war

upon the poor Chinese, and compel them to pay for the opium that had

been destroyed; and now the profits of the Indian government from

poisoning a whole people have risen from £1,500,000, at the date of

the above extract, to the enormous sum of £3,500,000, or $16,800,000,

and the market is, as we are informed, still extending itself.[101]

That the reader may see, and understand how directly the government is

concerned in this effort at demoralizing and enslaving the Chinese,

the following extract is given:--

"For the supply and manufacture of government opium there is a

separate establishment. There are two great opium agencies at

Ghazeepore and Patna, for the Benares and Bahar provinces. Each opium

agent has several deputies in different districts, and a native

establishment. They enter into contracts with the cultivators for the

supply of opium at a rate fixed to meet the market. The land revenue

authorities do not interfere, except to prevent cultivation without

permission. Government merely bargains with the cultivators as

cultivators, in the same way as a private merchant would, _and makes

advances to them for the cultivation_. The only difficulty found is

to prevent, their cultivating too much, as the rates are favourable,

government a sure purchaser, and the cultivation liked. The land

cultivated is measured, and precaution is taken that the produce is

all sold to government. The raw opium thus received is sent to the

head agency, where it is manufactured, packed in chests, and sealed

with the Company's seal."[102]

It would seem to the author of this paragraph almost a matter of

rejoicing that the Chinese are bound to continue large consumers of

the drug. "The failure of one attempt to exclude it has shown," as he

thinks--

"That they are not likely to effect that object; and if we do not

supply them, some one else will; but the worst of it is, according to

some people, that if the Chinese only legalized the cultivation in

their own country, they could produce it much cheaper, and our market

would be ruined. Both for their sakes and ours we must hope that it

is not so, or that they will not find it out."[103]

Need we wonder, when gentlemen find pleasure in the idea of an

increasing revenue from _forcing this trade in despite of all the

efforts of the more civilized Chinese government_, that "intemperance

increases" where the British "rule and system has been long

established?" Assuredly not. Poor governments are, as we everywhere

see, driven to encourage gambling, drunkenness, and other

immoralities, as a means of extracting revenue from their unfortunate

taxpayers; and the greater the revenue thus obtained, the poorer

become the people and the weaker the government. Need we be surprised

that that of India should be reduced to become manufacturer and

smuggler of opium, when the people are forced to exhaust the land by

sending away its raw products, and when the restraints upon the _mere

collection_ of domestic salt are so great that English salt now finds

a market in India? The following passage on this subject is worthy of

the perusal of those who desire fully to understand how it is that the

people of that country are restrained in the application of their

labour, and why it is that labour is so badly paid:--

"But those who cry out in England against the monopoly, and their

unjust exclusion from the salt trade, are egregiously mistaken. As

concerns them there is positively no monopoly, but the most absolute

free trade. And, more than this, the only effect of the present mode

of manufacture in Bengal is to give them a market which they would

never otherwise have. A government manufacture of salt is doubtless

more expensive than a private manufacture; but the result of this,

and of the equality of duty on bad and good salt, is, that fine

English salt now more or less finds a market in India; whereas, were

the salt duty and all government interference discontinued to-morrow,

the cheap Bengal salt would be sold at such a rate that not a

pound of English or any other foreign salt could be brought into the

market."[104]

Nevertheless, the system is regarded as one of perfect free trade!

Notwithstanding all these efforts at maintaining the revenue, the debt

has increased the last twelve years no less than £15,000,000, or

seventy-two millions of dollars; and yet the government is absolute

proprietor of all the land of India, and enjoys so large a portion of

the beneficial interest in it, that private property therein is

reduced to a sum absolutely insignificant, as will now be shown.

The gross land revenue obtained from a country with an area of 491,448

square miles, or above three hundred millions of acres, is 151,786,743

rupees, equal to fifteen millions of pounds sterling, or seventy-two

millions of dollars.[105] What is the value of private rights of

property, subject to the payment of this tax, or rent, may be judged

from the following facts:--In 1848-9 there were sold for taxes, in

that portion of the country subject to the permanent settlement, 1169

estates, at something less than four years' purchase of the tax.

Further south, in the Madras government, where the ryotwar settlement

is in full operation, the land "would be sold" for balances of rent,

but "generally it is not," as we are told, "and for a very good

reason, viz. that nobody will buy it." Private rights in land being

there of no value whatsoever, "the collector of Salem," as Mr.

Campbell informs us--

"Naïvely mentions 'various unauthorized modes of stimulating the

tardy,' rarely resorted to by heads of villages; such as 'placing him

in the sun, obliging him to stand on one leg, or to sit with his head

confined between his knees.'"[106]

In the north-west provinces, "the settlement," as our author states,

"has certainly been successful in giving a good market value to landed

property;" that is, it sells at about "four years' purchase on the

revenue."[107] Still further north, in the newly acquired provinces,

we find great industry, "every thing turned to account," the

assessment, to which the Company succeeded on the deposition of the

successors of Runjeet Singh, more easy, and land more valuable.[108]

The value of land, like that of labour, therefore increases as we pass

_from_ the old to the new settlements, being precisely the reverse of

what would be the case if the system tended to the enfranchisement and

elevation of the people, and precisely what should be looked for in a

country whose inhabitants were passing from freedom toward slavery.

With the data thus obtained we may now ascertain, with perhaps some

approach to accuracy, the value of all the private rights in the land

of India. In no case does that subject to tax appear to be worth more

than four years' purchase, while in a very large portion of the

country it would seem to be worth absolutely nothing. There are,

however, some tax-free lands that may be set off against those held

under the ryotwar settlement; and it is therefore possible that the

whole are worth four years' purchase, which would give 288 millions of

dollars, or 60 millions of pounds sterling, as the value of all the

rights in land acquired by the people of India by all the labour of

their predecessors and themselves in the many thousands of years it

has been cultivated. The few people that have occupied the little and

sandy State of New Jersey, with its area of 6900 square miles, have

acquired rights in and on the land that are valued, subject to the

claims of government, at 150 millions of dollars; and the few that

have occupied the little island on which stands the city of New York

have acquired rights that would sell in the market for at least

one-half more than could be obtained for all the proprietary rights to

land in India, with 300 millions of acres and 96 millions of

inhabitants!

"Under the native princes," says Mr. Campbell, "India was a paying

country." Under British rule, it has ceased to be so, because under

that rule all power of combined action has been annihilated, or is in

train to be, and will be so, by aid of the system that looks to

compelling the whole people, men, women, and children, to work in the

field, producing commodities to be exported in their raw state. Every

act of association is an act of trade, and whatever tends to destroy

association must destroy trade. The internal commerce of India

declines steadily, and the external amounts to but about half a dollar

per head, and no effort can make it grow to any extent. The returns of

last year, of English trade, show a diminution as compared with those

of the previous one, whereas with almost all other countries there is

a large increase. Cuba exports to the large amount of twenty-five

dollars per head, or almost fifty times as much as India; and she

takes of cotton goods from England four times as much per head; and

this she does because it is a part of the policy of Spain to bring

about combination of action, and to enable the planter and the artisan

to work together, whereas the policy of England is to destroy

everywhere the power of association, and thus to destroy the domestic

trade, upon which the foreign one must be built. Centralization is

adverse to trade, and to the freedom of man. Spain does not seek to

establish centralization. Provided she receives a given amount of

revenue, she is content to permit her subjects to employ themselves at

raising sugar or making cloth, as they please, and thus to advance in

civilization; and by this very course it is that she is enabled to

obtain revenue. How centralization operates on the people and the

revenue, and how far it tends to promote the civilization or the

freedom of man, may be seen, on a perusal of the following extract

from a recent speech of Mr. Anstey, in the British House of Commons:--

"Such was the financial condition of India, which the right

honourable gentleman believed to be so excellent. The intelligent

natives of India, however, who visited this country, were not of that

opinion. They told us that the complaints sent from India to this

country were disregarded here, and that they always would be

disregarded as long as inquiry into them was imperial, not local.

They stated that their condition was one of hopeless misery, and that

it had been so ever since they came under our rule. The result was,

that cholera had become the normal order of things in that country,

and in India it never died out. It appeared from the reports of

medical officers in the army that it did not attack the rich and

well-fed so frequently as it attacked the poor, and that among them

it had made the most fearful ravages. The first authentic account

they had of the appearance of the cholera in India was coincident

with the imposition of the salt monopoly by Warren Hastings; and by a

just retribution it had visited their own shores, showing them with

what a scourge they had so long afflicted the natives of India. It

might be said of the other taxes that, in one form or another, they

affected every branch of industry and every necessary of life. They

affected even the tools of trade, and were sometimes equal in amount

to the sum for which the tool itself could be purchased in the

market.

"When on a former occasion he had mentioned those facts before a

member of the court of directors, he was told that if he had seen the

papers in the archives, he would perceive that an alteration had

taken place; but he found, on an inspection of the papers, that the

result to the purchaser of salt is almost equal to what it had been.

It was a well known fact that the natives dare not complain. When

they asked for protection from the laws, they were treated as Juttee

Persaud had been treated last year--cases were fabricated against

them, and they were prosecuted for their lives. With the examples

before them of Nuncomar and Juttee Persaud, it was not surprising

that the natives were so backward in bringing to justice the persons

whose oppressions had been so great."

It was in the face of facts like those here presented, and other

similar ones presented to us in the history of Jamaica, that in a

recent despatch Lord Palmerston thus instructed his minister at

Madrid:--

"I have to instruct your lordship to observe to M. de Miraflores that

the slaves of Cuba form a large portion, and by no means an

unimportant one, of the population of Cuba; and that any steps taken

to provide for their emancipation would, therefore, as far as the

black population is concerned, be quite in unison with the

recommendation made by her Majesty's government, that measures should

be adopted for contenting the people of Cuba, with a view to secure

the connection between that island and the Spanish crown; and it must

be evident that if the negro population of Cuba were rendered free,

that fact would create a most powerful element of resistance to any

scheme for annexing Cuba to the United States, where slavery still

exists.

"With regard to the bearing which negro emancipation would have on

the interests of the white proprietors, it may safely be affirmed

that free labour costs less than slave labour, and it is indisputable

that a free and contented peasantry are safer neighbours for the

wealthy classes above them than ill-treated and resentful slaves; and

that slaves must, from the nature of things, be more or less

ill-treated, is a truth which belongs to the inherent principles of

human nature, and is quite as inevitable as the resentment, however

suppressed it may be, which is the consequence of ill-treatment."

The negroes of Jamaica have never been permitted to apply their spare

labour even to the refining of their own sugar, _nor are they so at

this day_. They must export it raw, and the more they send the lower

is the price and the larger the proportion taken by the

government--but the poor negro is ruined. Spain, on the contrary,

permits the Cubans to engage in any pursuits they may deem most likely

to afford them a return to labour and capital; and, as a necessary

consequence of this, towns and cities grow up, capital is attracted to

the land, which becomes from day to day more valuable, labour is in

demand, and there is a gradual, though slow, improvement of condition.

The power to resort to other modes of employment diminishes the

necessity for exporting sugar, and when exported to Spain, the

producer is enabled to take for himself nearly the whole price paid by

the consumer, the government claiming only a duty of fifteen per cent.

The Hindoo, like the negro, is shut out from the workshop. If he

attempts to convert his cotton into yarn, his spindle is taxed in

nearly all of the profit it can yield him. If he attempts to make

cloth, his loom is subjected to a heavy tax, from which that of his

wealthy English competitor is exempt. His iron ore and his coal must

remain in the ground, and if he dares to apply his labour even to the

collection of the salt which crystallizes before his door, he is

punished by fine and imprisonment. He must raise sugar to be

transported to England, there to be exchanged, perhaps, for English

salt. For the sugar, arrived in that country, the workman pays at the

rate perhaps of forty shillings a hundred, of which the government

claims one-third, the ship owner, the merchant, and others, another

third, and the remaining third is to be fought for by the agents of

the Company, anxious for revenue, and the poor ryot, anxious to obtain

a little salt to eat with his rice, and as much of his neighbour's

cotton, in the form of English cloth, as will suffice to cover his

loins.

Under the Spanish system capital increases, and labour is so valuable

that slaves still continue to be imported. Under the English one,

labour is valueless, and men sell themselves for long years of slavery

at the sugar culture in the Mauritius, in Jamaica, and in Guiana. In

all countries _to which_ men are attracted, civilization tends upward;

but in all those _from which_ men fly, it tends downward.

At the moment this despatch was being written by Lord Palmerston, Mr.

Campbell was writing his book, in which it is everywhere shown that

the tendency of India toward centralization and absenteeism, and

therefore toward exhaustion and slavery, is rapidly on the increase.

"The communication with India," as he says--

"Is every day so much increased and facilitated that we become more

and more entirely free from native influence, and the disposition to

Hindooize, which at first certainly showed itself, has altogether

disappeared. The English in India have now become as English as in

England.

"While this state of things has great advantages, it has also some

disadvantage in the want of local knowledge, and of permanency in the

tenure of appointments which results. As there has been a constant

succession of total strangers in every appointment, it follows that

the government must be entirely carried on upon general principles,

with little aid from local knowledge and experience."--P. 202.

The tendency toward the transfer of English capital to India, as he

informs us, retrogrades instead of advancing, and this is precisely

what we might expect to find to be the case. _Capital never seeks a

country from which men are flying as they now fly from India._ The

English houses bring none, but being in general mere speculators, they

borrow largely and enter into large operations, and when the bubble

bursts, the poor Hindoo suffers in the prostration of trade and

decline in the prices of cotton and sugar. "The consequence is," as

Mr. Campbell says--

"That European speculation has retrograded. Far up the country, where

the agents of the old houses were formerly numerous and well supplied

with money, the planters are now few and needy, and generally earn

but a precarious subsistence as in fact the servants of native

capitalists."--P. 204.

Iron, by aid of which the people might improve their processes of

cultivation and manufacture, has little tendency toward India. The

average export of it to that country in 1845 and '46 was but 13,000

tons, value £160,000, or about two-pence worth for every five of the

population. Efforts are now being made for the construction of

railroads, but their object is that of carrying out the system of

centralization, and thus still further destroying the power of

association, because they look to the annihilation of what still

remains of domestic manufacture, and thus _cheapening cotton_. With

all the improvements in the transportation of that commodity, its poor

cultivator obtains less for it than he did thirty years since, and the

effect of further improvement can be none other than that of producing

a still further reduction, and still further deterioration of the

condition of the men who raise food and cotton. As yet the power of

association continues in the Punjab, but it is proposed now to hold

there great fairs for the sale of English manufactures, and the day

cannot be far distant when the condition of the people of the new

provinces will be similar to that of those of the old ones, as no

effort will be spared to carry out the system which looks to driving

the whole people to agriculture, and thus compelling them to exhaust

their land. It is needed, says Mr. Chapman, the great advocate of

railways in India, that the connection between "the Indian grower and

English spinner" become more intimate, and "_the more the English is

made to outweigh the native home demand, the more strongly will the

native agriculturist feel that his personal success depends on

securing and improving his British connection_"[109]6750--that is, the

more the natives can be prevented from combining, their labours, the

greater, as Mr. Chapman thinks, will be the prosperity of India.

Centralization has impoverished, and to a considerable extent

depopulated, that country, but its work is not yet done. It remains

yet to reduce the people of the Punjab, of Affghanistan and Burmah, to

the condition of the Bengalese.

The Burmese war is, as we are informed, "connected with at least

certain hopes of getting across to China through the Burmese

territories,"[110] and, of course of extending the trade in opium

throughout the whole of interior China; and the revenue from that

source will pay the cost of annexation. It is by aid of this powerful

narcotic, probably, that "civilization" is about, as we are told, to

"plant her standard on the ruins of kingdoms which for thousands of

years have been smouldering into dust."[111]

We are often told of "the dim moral perceptions" of the people of

India, and as many of those who will read this volume may be disposed

to think that the cause of poverty lies in some deficiencies in the

character of the Hindoo, it may not be improper, with a view to the

correction of that opinion, to offer a few passages from the very

interesting work of Colonel Sleeman, who furnishes more information on

that head than any other recent traveller or resident; and his remarks

are the more valuable because of being the fruit of many years of

observation:--

"Sir Thomas Munro has justly observed, 'I do not exactly know what is

meant by civilizing the people of India. In the theory and practice

of good government they may be deficient; but if a good system of

agriculture--if unrivalled manufactures--if a capacity to produce

what convenience or luxury demands--if the establishment of schools

for reading and writing--if the general practice of kindness and

hospitality--and above all, if a scrupulous respect and delicacy

toward the female sex are amongst the points that denote a civilized

people; then the Hindoos are not inferior in civilization to the

people of Europe.--_Rambles_, vol. i. 4.

"Our tents were pitched upon a green sward on one bank of a small

stream running into the Nerbudda close by, while the multitude

occupied the other bank. At night all the tents and booths are

illuminated, and the scene is hardly less animating by night than by

day; but what strikes an European most is the entire absence of all

tumult and disorder at such places. He not only sees no disturbance,

but feels assured that there will be none; and leaves his wife and

children in the midst of a crowd of a hundred thousand persons all

strangers to them, and all speaking a language and following a

religion different from theirs, while he goes off the whole day,

hunting and shooting in the distant jungles, without the slightest

feeling of apprehension for their safety or comfort."--_Ibid_. 2.

"I am much attached to the agricultural classes of India generally,

and I have found among them some of the best men I have ever known.

The peasantry in India have generally very good manners, and are

exceedingly intelligent, from having so much more leisure, and

unreserved and easy intercourse with those above them."--_Ibid_. 76.

"I must say, that I have never either seen or read of a nobler spirit

than seems to animate all classes of these communities in India on

such distressing occasions."--_Ibid_. 197.

"There is no part of the world, I believe, where parents are so much

reverenced by their sons as they are in India in all classes of

society."--_Ibid_. 330.

"An instance of deliberate fraud or falsehood among native merchants

of respectable stations in society, is extremely rare. Among the many

hundreds of bills I have had to take from them for private

remittances, I have never had one dishonoured, or the payment upon

one delayed beyond the day specified; nor do I recollect ever hearing

of one who had. They are so careful not to speculate beyond their

means, that an instance of failure is extremely rare among them. No

one ever in India hears of families reduced to ruin or distress by

the failure of merchants and bankers; though here, as in all other

countries advanced in the arts, a vast number of families subsist

upon the interest of money employed by them.

"There is no class of men more interested in the stability of our

rule in India than this of the respectable merchants; nor is there

any upon whom the welfare of our government, and that of the people,

more depend. Frugal, first, upon principle, that they may not in

their expenditure encroach upon their capitals, they become so by

habit; and when they advance in life they lay out their accumulated

wealth in the formation of those works which shall secure for them,

from generation to generation, the blessings of the people of the

towns in which they have resided, and those of the country around. It

would not be too much to say, that one-half the great works which

embellish and enrich the face of India, in tanks, groves, wells,

temples, &c., have been formed by this class of the people solely

with the view of securing the blessings of mankind by contributing to

their happiness in solid and permanent works."--_Ibid_. vol. ii. 142.

"In the year 1829, while I held the civil charge of the district of

Jubbulpore, in this valley of the Nerbudda, I caused an estimate to

be made of the public works of ornament and utility it contained. The

population of the district at that time amounted to five hundred

thousand souls, distributed among four thousand and fifty-three

occupied towns, villages, and hamlets. There were one thousand

villages more which had formerly been occupied, but were then

deserted. There were two thousand two hundred and eighty-eight tanks,

two hundred and nine bowlies, or large wells, with flights of steps

extending from the top down to the water when in its lowest stage;

fifteen hundred and sixty wells lined with brick and stone, cemented

with lime, but without stairs; three hundred and sixty Hindoo

temples, and twenty-two Mohammedan mosques. The estimated cost of

these works in grain at the present price, that is the quantity that

would have been consumed, had the labour been paid in kind at the

present ordinary rate, was eighty-six lacks, sixty-six thousand and

forty-three rupees (86,66,043,) £866,604 sterling.

"The labourer was estimated to be paid at the rate of about two-thirds

the quantity of corn he would get in England if paid in kind,

and corn sells here at about one-third the price it fetches in

average seasons in England. In Europe, therefore, these works,

supposing the labour equally efficient, would have cost at least four

times the sum here estimated; and such works formed by private

individuals for the public good, without any view whatever to return

in profits, indicates a very high degree of _public spirit_.

"The whole annual rent of the lands of this district amounts to about

six hundred and fifty thousand rupees a year, (£65,000 sterling,)

that is, five hundred thousand demandable by the government, and one

hundred and fifty thousand by those who hold the lands at lease

immediately under government, over and above what may be considered

as the profits of their stock as farmers. These works must,

therefore, have cost about thirteen times the amount of the annual

rent of the whole of the lands of the districts--or the whole annual

rent for above thirteen years!"--_Ibid_, vol. ii. 194.

We have here private rights in land amounting to 150,000 rupees, in a

country abounding in coal and iron ore,[112] and with a population of

half a million of people. Estimating the private interest at ten

years' purchase, it is exactly three years' purchase of the land-tax;

and it follows of course, that _the government takes every year

one-fourth of the whole value of the property_,--at which rate the

little State of New Jersey, with its half-million of inhabitants,

would pay annually above thirty millions of dollars for the support of

those who were charged with the administration of its affairs! Need we

wonder at the poverty of India when thus taxed, while deprived of all

power even to manure its land?

"Three-fourths of the recruits for our Bengal native infantry are

drawn from the Rajpoot peasantry of the kingdom of Oude, on the left

bank of the Ganges, where their affections have been linked to the

soil for a long series of generations. The good feelings of the

families from which they are drawn, continue, through the whole

period of their service, to exercise a salutary influence over their

conduct as men and as soldiers. Though they never take their families

with them, they visit them on furlough every two or three years, and

always return to them when the surgeon considers a change of air

necessary to their recovery from sickness. Their family circles are

always present to their imaginations; and the recollections of their

last visit, the hopes of the next, and the assurance that their

conduct as men and as soldiers in the interval will be reported to

those circles by their many comrades, who are annually returning on

furlough to the same parts of the country, tend to produce a general

and uniform propriety of conduct, that is hardly to be found among

the soldiers of any other army in the world, and which seems

incomprehensible to those who are unacquainted with its

source,--veneration for parents cherished through life and a never

impaired love of home, and of all the dear objects by which it is

constituted."--Ibid. vol. ii. 415.

Such are the people that we see now forced to abandon a land of which

not more than half the cultivable part is in cultivation--a land that

abounds in every description of mineral wealth--and to sell themselves

for long years of service, apart from wives, children, and friends, to

be employed in the most unhealthful of all pursuits, the cultivation

of sugar in the Mauritius, and the Sandwich Islands, and among the

swamps of British Guiana, and Jamaica, and for a reward of four or

five rupees ($2 to $2.50) per month. What was their condition in the

Mauritius is thus shown by an intelligent and honest visitor of the

island in 1838:--

"After the passage of the act abolishing slavery, an arrangement was

sanctioned by the Colonial Government, for the introduction of a

great number of Indian labourers into the colony. They were engaged

at five rupees, equal to ten shillings, a month, for five years, with

also one pound of rice, a quarter of a pound of dhall, or grain, a

kind of pulse, and one ounce of butter, of ghee, daily. But for every

day they were absent from their work they were to return two days to

their masters, who retained one rupee per month, to pay an advance

made of six months' wages, and to defray the expense of their

passage. If these men came into Port Louis to complain of their

masters, they were lodged in the Bagne prison, till their masters

were summoned. The masters had a great advantage before the

magistrates over their servants: the latter being foreigners, but few

of them could speak French, and they had no one to assist them in

pleading their cause. They universally represented themselves as

having been deceived with respect to the kind of labour to be exacted

from them. But perhaps the greatest evil attendant on their

introduction into the Mauritius was the small proportion of females

imported with them, only about two hundred being brought with upward

of ten thousand men. It was evident that unless the system of

employing them were closely watched, there was a danger that it might

ultimately grow into another species of slavery."[113]

We see thus that while the females of India are deprived of all power

to employ themselves in the lighter labour of manufacture, the men are

forced to emigrate, leaving behind their wives and daughters, to

support themselves as best they may. The same author furnishes an

account of the Indian convicts that had been transported to the

island, as follows:--

"Among the Indian convicts working on the road, we noticed one

wearing chains; several had a slight single ring round the ankle.

They are lodged in huts with flat roofs, or in other inferior

dwellings, near the road. There are about seven hundred of them in

the island. What renders them peculiarly objects of sympathy is, that

they were sent here for life, and no hope of any remission of

sentence is held out to them for good conduct. Their's is a hopeless

bondage; and though it is said by some that they are not hard worked,

yet they are generally, perhaps constantly, breaking stones and

mending the road, and in a tropical sun. There are among them persons

who were so young when transported that, in their offences, they

could only be looked on as the dupes of those that were older; and

many of them bear good characters."[114]

At the date to which these passages refer there was a dreadful famine

in India; but, "during the prevalence of this famine," as we are

told,--

"Rice was going every hour out of the country. 230,371 bags of 164

pounds each--making 37,780,844 lbs.--were exported from Calcutta.

Where? To the Mauritius, to feed the kidnapped Coolies. Yes: to feed

the men who had been stolen from the banks of the Ganges and the

hills adjacent, and dragged from their native shore, under pretence

of going to one of the Company's villages, to grow in the island of

Mauritius what they might have grown in abundance upon their own

fertile, but over-taxed land. The total amount of rice exported from

Calcutta, during the famine in 1838, was 151,923,696 lbs., besides

13,722,408 lbs. of other edible grains, which would have fed and kept

alive all those who perished that year. Wives might have been saved

to their husbands, babes to their mothers, friends to their friends;

villages might still have been peopled; a sterile land might have

been restored to verdure. Freshness and joy and the voices of

gladness, might have been there. Now, all is stillness, and

desolation, and death. Yet we are told we have nothing to do with

India."[115]

The nation that exports raw produce _must_ exhaust its land, and then

it _must_ export its men, who fly from famine, leaving the women and

children to perish behind them.

By aid of continued Coolie immigration the export of sugar from the

Mauritius has been doubled in the last sixteen years, having risen

from 70 to 140 millions of pounds. Sugar is therefore very cheap, and

the foreign competition is thereby driven from the British market.

"Such conquests," however, says, very truly, the London _Spectator_--

"Don't always bring profit to the conqueror; nor does production

itself prove prosperity. Competition for the possession of a field

may be carried so far as to reduce prices below prime cost; and it is

clear from the notorious facts of the West Indies--from the change of

property, from the total unproductiveness of much property

still--that the West India production of sugar has been carried on,

not only without replacing capital, but with a constant sinking of

capital."

The "free" Coolie and the "free negro" of Jamaica, have been urged to

competition for the sale of sugar, and they seem likely to perish

together; but compensation for this is found in the fact that--

"Free-trade has, in reducing the prices of commodities for home

consumption, enabled the labourer to devote a greater share of his

income toward purchasing clothing and luxuries, and has increased the

home trade to an enormous extent."[116]

What effect this reduction of "the prices of commodities for home

consumption" has had upon the poor Coolie, may be judged from the

following passage:--

"I here beheld, for the first time, a class of beings of whom we have

heard much, and for whom I have felt considerable interest. I refer

to the Coolies imported by the British government to take the place

of the _faineant_ negroes, when the apprenticeship system was

abolished. Those that I saw were wandering about the streets, dressed

rather tastefully, but always meanly, and usually carrying over their

shoulder a sort of _chiffonier's_ sack, in which they threw whatever

refuse stuff they found in the streets or received as charity. Their

figures are generally superb; and their Eastern costume, to which

they adhere as far as their poverty will permit of any clothing, sets

off their lithe and graceful forms to great advantage. Their faces

are almost uniformly of the finest classic mould, and illuminated by

pairs of those dark swimming and propitiatory eyes, which exhaust the

language of tenderness and passion at a glance.

"But they are the most inveterate mendicants on the island. It is

said that those brought from the interior of India are faithful and

efficient workmen, while those from Calcutta and its vicinity are

good for nothing. Those that were prowling about the streets of

Spanish-town and Kingston, I presume, were of the latter class, for

there is not a planter on the island, it is said, from whom it would

be more difficult to get any work than from one of these. They

subsist by begging altogether: they are not vicious, nor intemperate,

nor troublesome particularly, except as beggars. In that calling they

have a pertinacity before which a Northern mendicant would grow pale.

They will not be denied. They will stand perfectly still and look

through a window from the street for a quarter of an hour, if not

driven away, with their imploring eyes fixed upon you, like a

stricken deer, without saying a word or moving a muscle. They act as

if it were no disgrace for them to beg, as if the least

indemnification which they are entitled to expect, for the outrage

perpetrated upon them in bringing them from their distant homes to

this strange island, is a daily supply of their few and cheap

necessities, as they call for them.

"I confess that their begging did not leave upon my mind the

impression produced by ordinary mendicancy. They do not look as if

they ought to work. I never saw one smile, and though they showed no

positive suffering, I never saw one look happy. Each face seemed to

be constantly telling the unhappy story of their woes, and like

fragments of a broken mirror, each reflecting in all its hateful

proportions the national outrage of which they are the victims."[117]

The slave trade has taken a new form, the mild and gentle Hindoo

having taken the place of the barbarous and fierce African; and this

trade is likely to continue so long as it shall be held to be the

chief object of the government of a Christian people to secure to its

people cheap cotton and sugar, without regard to the destruction of

life of which that cheapness is the cause. The people of England send

to India missionary priests and bishops, but they obtain few converts;

nor can it ever be otherwise under a system which tends to destroy the

power of association, and thus prevents that diversification of

employments that is indispensable to the improvement of physical,

moral, intellectual, or political condition. May we not hope that at

no very distant day they will arrive at the conclusion that such

association is as necessary to the Hindoo as they know it to be to

themselves, and that if they desire success in their attempts to bring

the followers of Mohammed, or of Brahma, to an appreciation of the

doctrines of Christ, they must show that their practice and their

teachings are in some degree in harmony with each other? When that day

shall come they will be seen endeavouring to remedy the evil they have

caused, and permitting the poor Hindoo to obtain establishments in

which labour may be combined for the production of iron and of

machinery, by aid of which the native cotton may be twisted in the

neighbourhood in which it is produced, thus enabling the now unhappy

cultivator to exchange directly with his food-producing neighbour,

relieved from the necessity for sending his products to a distance, to

be brought back again in the form of yarn or cloth, at fifteen or

twenty times the price at which he sold it in the form of cotton. That

time arrived, they will appreciate the sound good sense contained in

the following remarks of Colonel Sleeman:--

"If we had any great establishment of this sort in which Christians

could find employment, and the means of religious and secular

instruction, thousands of converts would soon flock to them; and they

would become vast sources of future improvement in industry, social

comfort, municipal institutions, and religion. What chiefly prevents

the spread of Christianity in India is the dread of exclusion from

caste and all its privileges; and the utter hopelessness of their

ever finding any respectable circle of society of the adopted

religion, which converts, or would be converts to Christianity, now

everywhere feel. Form such circles for them--make the members of

these circles happy in the exertion of honest and independent

industry--let those who rise to eminence in them feel that they are

considered as respectable and as important in the social system as

the servants of government, and converts will flock around you from

all parts, and from all classes of the Hindoo community. * * * I am

persuaded that a dozen such establishments as that of Mr. Thomas

Ashton, of Hyde, as described by a physician of Manchester, and

noticed in Mr. Baines's admirable work on the Cotton Manufactures of

Great Britain, (page 447,) would do more in the way of conversion

among the people of India than has ever yet been done by all the

religious establishments, or ever will be done by them without some

such aid."--Vol. ii. 164.

That there is a steady increase in the tendency toward personal

servitude, or slavery, in India, no one can doubt who will study

carefully the books on that country; and it may not be amiss to

inquire on whom rests the responsibility for this state of things. By

several of the persons that have been quoted, Messrs. Thompson,

Bright, and others, it is charged upon the Company; but none that read

the works of Messrs. Campbell and Sleeman can hesitate to believe that

the direction is now animated by a serious desire to improve the

condition of its poor subjects. Unfortunately, however, the Company is

nearly in the condition of the land-holders of Jamaica, and is itself

tending toward ruin, because its subjects are limited to agriculture,

and because they receive so small a portion of the value of their very

small quantity of products. Now, as in the days of _Joshua Gee_, the

largest portion of that value remains in England, whose people eat

cheap sugar while its producer starves in India. Cheap sugar and cheap

cotton are obtained by the sacrifice of the interests of a great

nation; and while the policy of England shall continue to look to

driving the women and children of India to the labours of the field,

and the men to the raising of sugar in the Mauritius, the soil must

continue to grow poorer, the people must become more and more

enslaved, and the government must find itself more and more dependent

for revenue on the power to poison the people of China; and therefore

will it be seen that however good may be the intentions of the

gentlemen charged with the duties of government, they must find

themselves more and more compelled to grind the poor ryot in the hope

of obtaining revenue.