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 331806 
 
"The government of a people by itself has a meaning and a reality, 
 bat such a thing as government of one people by another does not 
 and cannot exist." 
 
 John Stuart Mill. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, India may be said to 
 have been, to the people of Europe, an unknown land. Save to the 
 learned who had read of its ancient fame, or to such as listened to 
 the wonder-weaving legends that now and then made their way from the 
 shores of the I evant, its name was a sound that woke no echo of indi- 
 vidual hope or national solicitude. It was out of reach; it was out 
 of sight ; from the cupidity of the Occident it was safe. But distance, 
 which had hitherto left fair Hindustan secure from European lust, 
 seemed to lessen year by year after the Portuguese and Dutch mariners 
 had proved that the Cape of Storms could be safely passed in ships of 
 heavy burthen. 
 
 Gradually following the footprints of the Portuguese and the Dutch, 
 there appeared another people on the coasts of the fabulous "Golden 
 Chersonese", who humbly craved the permission of the rulers to squat 
 near the seashore. They were the English at the beginning of the 
 seventeenth century, whose King James I addressed a letter to his 
 "illustrious brother," the Emperor of Delhi, commending them to his 
 protecting care. Jehangir allowed them to found settlements at Surat, 
 Cambay, and Ahmedabad, and in 1613 issued a firman (order) con- 
 firming them in these possessions. Thus the English East India Com- 
 pany was founded, which gradually made its way to be the" paramount 
 power in Hindustan. More than two centuries have elapsed since a 
 few English merchants humbly solicited from the princes. of Hindustan 
 permission to traffic with their people. At present Great Britain is 
 the sovereign power over India; but the East India Company has 
 disappeared, and, since 1858, India has been directly under the Bri- 
 tish Crown which is represented by a Viceroy. 
 
 Thus the external form of the British Domination over India has 
 changed, but the spirit remains the same. The British no longer figure 
 as merchants, but all the same month by month a mercantile trans- 
 action is carried through, and India is ruled by the commercial policy 
 of Great Britain. The whole British connection with India rests upon 
 
► 
 
 6 
 
 the maxim that the shop-keeping element in the relations between the two 
 countries shall be strictly maintained. India is ruled for the benefit of 
 Great Britain and the former country is aptly called the " milch-cow" of 
 England. Those who are acquainted with the history of the British 
 occupation of India, know it well that England's chief motive in going 
 to India was plunder and she has never lost sight of it. England's 
 unbounden prosperity owes its origin to her connection with India, 
 and it has largely been maintained — disguisedly — from the same 
 source, from the middle of the eighteenth century up to the present 
 time. "Possibly since the world began, no investment has ever yielded 
 the profit reaped from the Indian plunder." And this plunder madr 
 the English industrial supremacy possible. 
 
 But what has been the result of this alien occupation of India? The 
 world does not know much about it and the British prevent the facts 
 being known, while they eulogise their own rule that it is 
 "All for love and nothing for reward." 
 
 The apologists of the British rule spare no pains in portraying the 
 former Native rule in the blackest characters while they are in ecstacies 
 over their own. But in discerning the true state of affairs, those who 
 have no prejudice to warp their judgment, will come to a different con- 
 clusion. It will be evident to them that India is ruled for the benefit 
 of the British, and the British alone. No extenuating efforts can dis- 
 prove the fact that England suppresses all attempts of tije Indian people 
 to progress, no partisan spirit can deny the fact that the sources of India's 
 fabulous "wealth" have dried up and the country is racked with perennial 
 famines, no naked eyes can be blind to the fact that India is the most 
 poverty-stricken country in the world. In spite of the vauntings of the 
 British that their rule is providential and a blessing to India they 
 stand self -condemned. Some of their politicians have made no secret 
 of their policies in India. Thus a British-Indian statesman, Mr. Williams 
 Thackeray, said: "But in India, that haughty sp-rit, independence, and! 
 deep thought, which the possession of great wealth sometimes gives, { 
 ought to be suppressed. They are directly adverse to our power and* 
 interest. We do not want generals, statesmen and legislators; we wanti 
 industrious husbandmen." Another British statesman of greater fame/ 
 the Marquis of Salisbury, while secretary of State for India, uttered : "As 
 India must be bled, the lancet should be directed to the parts where 
 
the blood is congested, or at least sufficient, no{ to those which are 
 \1 already feeble for the want of it." Also another writer as early as 1792 
 has said : " ine primary object of Great Britain, let it be acknowledged, 
 was rather to discover what could be obtained from her Asiatic sub- 
 jects, than how they could be benefited." These utterances are the 
 true index of British policy and they clearly expose the fact that 
 the British policy is to exploit and plunder India, which country 
 is bleeding to death by this drainage of her wealth. The result of 
 this drain is summed up by Mr. H. Hyndman in these pungent 
 words: "India is becoming feebler and feebler. The very life-blood 
 of the great multitude under our rule is slowly yet ever faster 
 ebbing away." 
 
 To the casual visitor and the globetrotter and to those who are 
 fed with the stories of British apologists, this part of Indian life 
 is kept unknown, the misery and the sufferings of India are carefully 
 hidden from their gaze and a screen is drawn between their eyes and 
 Hindustan, which country is a "Terra incognita" to them. Because, 
 as has been well observed by William Digby, there are two countries, 
 situated in the land between the mountains which constitute the roof 
 of the world and the eight degree north of the equator and bounded 
 east and west by Chinese territory and the Afghan Kingdom. That 
 land called India is divided into: — Anglosthan, the land specially 
 ruled by the English, in which English investments have been made, 
 and by which a fair show and reality of prosperity are ensured, Hin- 
 dusthan, practically all India fifty miles from each side of the railway! 
 lines except the tea, coffee, indigo, and jute plantations and not in-f 
 eluding the Feudatory States. Anglosthan is the region to which the 
 roseate statements in the viceregal and State Secretary's speeches refer. 
 All that is eulogistic in Indian Welfare Blue Books apply only to An- t 
 glosthan, and this land is the theme of the praises of panegyrists of 
 the British rule in India. But behind the screen is Hindusthan, the 
 land where over three hundred millions of people live, and what do 
 we find there? 
 
 In that unfortunate land there is more preventable suffering, morej. 
 hunger, more insufficiently clothed bodies, more stunted intellects,! 
 more wasted lives, more disappointed men. In that unhappy country, \ / 
 as the result of the British occupation, there is chronic famine the \ 
 
> 
 
 8 
 
 \ appalling list of which is quoted below from the various famine com- 
 missions in their respective reports. 
 Famines : 
 i. In the last thirty years of the eighteenth century. 
 
 1769 — 1800 4 cases. 
 
 2. In the first half of the nineteenth century 1802 — 38. . . 12 cases. 
 
 3. In the second half of the nineteenth century, 
 1854 — 1908 35 cases. 
 
 And death from famine only during the nineteenth century is over 
 thirty two millions ! Mr. William Digby in his " Prosperous British 
 I India" says that the loss of life by war in all world during 107 years 
 \ (1793 — 1900) is five millions while the loss of life by famine in India 
 I during ten years (1891 — 1900) is nineteen millions ! While according to 
 u the calculations of some British statisticians there are ninety millions 
 of continually hungry people in British India at the beginning of the 
 twentieth century! The truth of this appalling misrule and misery of 
 the people is evident to every unbiassed person. It does not require 
 a searching enquiry to find out, that India enchained by a people who 
 crept in the land in the darkness of her nights, and whom her magna- 
 nimity had tolerated in the days of her power, is bereft of all mental 
 and material advancement and is lying stagnant for over a century! 
 To India is denied all the cheerfulness of life and all the hopes and 
 ambitions that make life worth living. As a result of this slavery life in 
 India has lost its interestingness ; as if the Indian's destiny is to be born 
 and rot on the Indian soil ! Why? Because India has been converted 
 mto a great slave-empire of Great Britain, 
 s^. Thus India is a great slave -empire of England governed with a 
 / rigour more harsh and more widescoped in its appliances than the 
 Russian despotism, for not only are the "knout" and the "pogrom" 
 resorted to, but the people are being slowly bled to death and the 
 land exploited by refined scientific methods. Thus England has applied 
 three methods for the subjugation of India. 
 
 1. Conquest by trade. — India's trade and industry have been 
 destroyed, all her wealth has been ruthlessly plundered, and 
 India in all her nakedness has been made economically dependent 
 on Great Britain which country owed her industrial supremacy 
 to the spoliation of India. 
 
2. Conquest by deliberate subjection. — All Indian aspirations and 
 development of strong character have been suppressed. The 
 Indian mind has been made barren of any originality, and 
 deliberately kept in ignorance. 
 
 3. Conquest by paralysing and stupefying the mind of the people 
 like drugging a person. The people are kept under an illusion 
 in order to make them more amenable to British control. The 
 people's character is deliberately debased, their mind is dena- 
 tionalized and perpetualy kept in ignorance and fed with stories 
 of England's greatness and "mission" in the world, and 
 systematic efforts are made to obliterate the race-consciousness. 
 
 These are the methods of British Government in India. As a result^ fi 
 the people have been made hewers of wood and drawers of water. 
 It is* not the Roman system of thoroughly Latinizing and assimilating 
 the subject races that is tried by England, but the system of ex- 
 ploitation and degradation of a race by another for the material benefits 
 of the latter. The very fact that India is shorn of all her prosperity, 
 her wealth all drained away on account of the heavy "tribute" to Eng- 
 land, her industries destroyed, her intellect stifled, her development 
 stunted in every direction, the progress of over three hundred millions 
 of people deliberately checked, is a blot on civilisation, is a crime 
 to humanity. 
 
 Humanity is composed of various races and nationalities, and civi-\ 
 lisation is the common heritage of all mankind. Various divisions of I 
 humanity in all ages have contributed to the development of civilisation, j 
 and India too had her quota in it. But modern India enfettered and I 
 groaning under an unprecedented despotism cannot contribute her * 
 share, hence an enslaved India is a hindrance to the progress of universal \ 
 civilisation and an era of peace. 
 
 It is a lasting shame to humanity that India's cause has been unheard/ I 
 her case has been unnoticed and the world has applauded perfidious ] 
 Albion. But tru th is stranger than fiction, and the truth is that Br itish 
 rule in India is a failure, that it is a despotism of the worst type, and 
 that India is unhappy and unfortunate under the British domination ; 
 and will the world in hearing the utterances of the Czar of Russia 
 wonder when he said, referring to his visit to India when he was Czaro- 
 
> 
 
 10 
 
 ttch: "Yes, the English, to do them justice, do not hide the bitter 
 nth from themselves that India is an unfortunate country!" 
 Yes, India is an unfortunate country on account of its life-blood 
 being sucked by the British vampires. The starving millions bound 
 hand and foot are groaning under the tyrannical fetters. They ask 
 the world to lift the veil thrown over Hindustan by hypocritical Eng- 
 land and discover the real situation. They appeal to the conscience 
 of the civilized world to hear their case, that British misrule has ruined 
 India and that they want to make themselves free from the hated yoke. 
 Their case is a just one and humanity will have to blush in shame 
 if it does not lend its ears to the cries of three hundred millions of people. 
 India stands at the bar of Humanity and pleads her case, she calls 
 witnesses from the enemy's camp to substantiate her charges, for even 
 in perfidious Albion there have been some men in every decade, though 
 their numbers are very few, who have raised their voices in protest or 
 confessed the truth otherwise. The damaging evidence of these men who 
 have exposed the true nature of the British rule in India, and some of 
 whom have dared to say that former Native rule was more conducive to 
 the happiness of the people than British rule, is published here to 
 prove that the British occupation of India has been a curse and Great 
 Britain stands condemned by h€r own tribunal. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 EVIDENCE ON THE POLICY 
 
 AND ADMINISTRATION 
 
 OF THE BRITISH 
 
 IN INDIA 
 
 I 
 
> 
 
 Administration of India under National Rule. 
 
 The Empire which Baber reared (in India) in the sixteenth century 
 was long one of the most extensive and splendid in the world. In 
 no European kingdom was so large a population subject to a single 
 prince, or so large a revenue poured into the treasury. The beauty 
 and magnificence of the buildings erected by the Sovereigns of Hindustan, 
 amazed even travellers who had seen St. Peters. The innumerable 
 retinues and gorgeous decorations which surrounded the throne of Delhi 
 dazzled even eyes which were accustomed to the pomp of Versailles. 
 Some of the great viceroys who held their posts by virtue of com- 
 missions from the Mogul ruled as many subjects as the King of France 
 or the Emperor of Germany. Even the deputies of those deputies might 
 well rank, as to extent of territory and amount of revenue with the 
 Grand-duke of Tuscany, or the Elector of Saxony. 
 
 Lord Macnulav — Life of Clive. 
 
I. 
 
 Marquis of Salisbury, former Prime Minister ot Great 
 Britain, on April 29, 1875. 
 
 "As India must be bled, the lancet should be directed to the parts 
 where the blood is congested, or, at least is sufficient, not to those which 
 are already feeble from the want of it." 
 
 II. 
 
 Lord Lytton, late Viceroy of India, in his confidential 
 
 minute of 1878 addressed to the Secretary of State. 
 
 (India Act of 1833). 
 
 "No sooner was the act passed than the Government began to 
 devise means for practically evading the fulfilment of it under the terms 
 of the act, which are studied and laid to heart by that increasing class 
 of educated Indians whose development the Government encourages 
 without being able to satisfy the aspirations of its existing members, 
 every such Indian once admitted to Government employment in posts 
 previously reserved to the Convenanted Service, is entitled to expect 
 and claim appointment in the fair course of promotion to the highest 
 posts in that service. We all know that these claims and expectations 
 never can or will be fulfilled. We have had to choose between prohibiting 
 them and cheating them, and we have chosen the least straight -forward 
 course. The application to Indians of the competitive examination 
 system as conducted in England, and the recent reduction in the age 
 at which candidates can compete, are all so many deliberate and trans- 
 parent subterfuges for stultifying the act, and reducing it to a dead 
 letter. Since I am writing confidentially, I don't hesitate to say th; 
 both the Government of England and of India appear to me, up to the 
 moment, unable to answer satisfactorily the charges of having taken 
 every means in their power of breaking to the heart the words of pro- 
 mise they have uttered to the ear." 
 
 1 
 
 aid 
 at' 
 he] 
 en/ 
 
 V 
 
 III. 
 
 Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, in a speech 
 at Jaipur in November 1902. 
 
 "There is no spectacle which finds less favour in my eyes or which 
 I have done more to discourage than that of a cluster of Europeans 
 settling down upon a Native State and sucking from it the moisture 
 which ought to give sustenance to its own people." 
 
*4 
 
 IV. 
 
 Sir Henry Cotton, "New India," p. 116. 
 
 "Lord Curzon lost sight of the fact that what is true of the Native 
 States is true also of the whole of India." 
 
 Lord Mayo, late Viceroy of India, " Minute of the 
 Viceroy, on military expenditure, October 3, 1870." 
 
 "A feeling of discontent and dissatisfaction exists among every 
 class, on account of the constant increase of taxation which has for 
 years been going on." 
 
 VI. 
 
 Marquis of Salisbury, former Prime Minister of Great 
 Britain. 
 
 " British rule in India is the despotism of a line of kings whose reigns 
 are limited by climatic causes to five years. " 
 
 VII. 
 
 Hon. T.I. Shore, "Notes on Indian Affairs," vol. II, 
 p-5*6. 
 
 "The fundamental principle of the English had been to make the 
 whole Indian nation subservient, in every possible way to the interests 
 • and benefits of themselves. They have been taxed to the utmost limit, every 
 successive province as it has fallen into our possession, has been made 
 field for higher exaction; and it has been our boast how greatly we 
 have raised the revenue above that which the Indian rulers were able 
 to extort. The Indians have been excluded from every honour, dignity, 
 or office which the lowest English man could be prevailed upon to 
 accept." 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Sir Edwin Arnold, " Dalhousie's Administration of 
 British India," vol.11, p. 219. 
 
 "If those who now rule India from a first-floor in Victoria-Street 
 will avoid the fallacy of believing the present surpluses anything like 
 perpetual, with the present army and home establishment ; if they will 
 discard their dangerous ideas of economy at the wrong end, by starving 
 the services and underpaying their Indian officials; if they will truly 
 govern India for the Indians, and not to maintain establishments at 
 home, it may be said that a happy as well as a new era has commenced." 
 
l 5 
 IX. 
 
 Edmund Burke's speech on Fox's East India Bill 
 in 1783. 
 
 "But under the British Government all this order is reversed. The 
 Tartar invasion was mischievous, but it is our protection that destroys 
 India. It was their enmity, but it is our friendship. Our conquest there, 
 after twenty years, is as crude as it was the first day. The Indian people 
 scarcely know what it is to see the grey hair of an Englishman. Young men, 
 boys almost, govern them, without society, and without sympathy to the 
 people of India. They have no more social habits with the people than 
 if they still resided in England; nor, indeed, any species of intercourse 
 but that which is necessary to making a sudden fortune, with a view 
 to a remote settlement. Animated with all the avarice of age, and all 
 the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another, wave after 
 wave, and there is nothing before the eyes of the Indian people but an 
 endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with 
 appetites continually reviewing for a food that is continually wasting. 
 Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India." 
 
 X 
 
 R. B. Sheridan, "Speech on the Begums of Oude," 
 February 7, 1787. 
 
 " It has been said of the Company that there was something in their 
 operations which combined the meanness of a pedlar with the profligacy 
 of a pirate. . . . Thus it was they united the mock majesty of a bloody 
 sceptre and the little traffic of a merchant's counting-house, wielding 
 a truncheon with one hand, and picking a pocket with the other." 
 
 XI. 
 
 Lord Chve's letter to the Court of Directors from 
 Calcutta, dated 30th September 1765. 
 
 "The sources of tyranny and oppression, which have been opened 
 by the European agents acting under the authority of the Company's 
 servants, and the numberless agents and sub-agents acting also under 
 them, will, I fear, be a lasting reproach to the English name in this 
 country. " 
 
 XII. 
 
 Governor Harry Verelst, in a letter to the Director 
 of East India Company, Letter dated 5th April 1 769. 
 
 "It will hardly be asserted that any country, however opulent, 
 could long maintain itself, much less flourish, when it received much 
 
16 
 
 less material supplies, and when a balance against it, of above one- 
 third of its whole yearly values, was yearly incurred. 
 
 "Besides this there are other concomitant circumstances, which 
 have contributed to diminish the riches of the country, and must, if 
 not remedied, soon exhaust them. I have observed that one great 
 advantage the country formerly reaped was the diffusion of its reve- 
 nues by large grants to different families, and by the expensive luxuries 
 of its governors. But now the whole amount of the lands is swallowed 
 up in one gulp — your treasury; nor does any part of it return into 
 circulation, except the sum issued from our investment and necessary 
 expenses." 
 
 XIII. 
 
 Sir Thomas Munro, his "Life," vol. III. 
 
 "The native governments had a class of richer gentry, composed 
 of Jagheardars and Emendars, and of all the higher civil and military 
 offices. These, with the principal merchants and ryots, formed a large 
 
 body, wealthy, or at least easy in their circumstances These 
 
 advantages have almost entirely ceased under our government. All 
 the civil and military offices of any importance are now held by Euro- 
 peans, whose savings go to their ovftft country. And yet while pursuing 
 a system, the tendency of which is to lower the character of a whole 
 people, we profess to be extremely anxious to improve that character 
 by education." 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Sir Henry Cotton, "New India," p. 118. 
 
 "Another source of impoverishment is the artificial exchange which 
 has been established in the Indian currency. While the silver value of 
 the rupee remains at about ten pence, its artificial value has been fixed 
 at a convertibility of one shilling and four pence into gold. At the same 
 time the purchasing power of the rupee has declined. . . . The Govern- 
 ment has profited immensely by the artificial raising of the rupee ; the 
 officials who draw their salaries in silver have also profited; but on 
 the other hand the bulk of the people and all classes of producers are 
 injuriously affected by this cause." 
 
 XV. 
 
 Ib„ pp. 1 13—1 15. 
 
 "The increasing poverty of India is due to many causes, but prima- 
 rily I trace it to the decay of handicrafts and the substitution of foreign 
 for home manufactures. . . . A further cause of the impoverishment 
 
'7 
 
 of India is the drain from fhe country. . . . The home charges increase 
 year by year. . . . Taking everything into consideration, it is a moderate 
 computation that the annual drafts from India to Great Britain amount 
 to a total of thirty millions. It can never be to the advantage of the 
 people of India to remit annually this enormous sum to a foreign 
 country." 
 
 XVI. 
 
 Minute of Lord Teigmnouth, dafed 1 8th June 1789 
 "Respecting the Permanent Settlement of the land- 
 in the Bengal Provinces," published in fifth Re- 
 port, 1812, pp. 169 — 238. Paragraphs 131 — 14O. 
 
 "The company are merchants as well as sovereigns of the country. 
 In the former capacity they engross its trade, whilst in the latter they 
 appropriate the revenues. The remittance to Europe of revenues are 
 made in the commodities of the country which are purchased by them. 
 
 " Whatever allowance we may make for the increased industry of 
 the subjects of the state, owing to the enhanced demand for the pro- 
 duce of it (supposing the demand to be enhanced), there is reason 
 t6 conclude that the benefits are more than counterbalanced by evils 
 inseparable from the system of the remote foreign dominion. 
 
 "Every information from the time of Bernier to the acquisition 
 of the Dewani shows the internal trade of the country, to have been 
 very considerable. . . . But from the year 1765 (after the foundation 
 of English domination) the reverse has taken place. The company's 
 trade produces no equivalent returns. 
 
 " Upon the whole, I have no hesitation in concluding that since 
 the company's acquisition of the Dewani the current specie of the 
 country has been greatly diminished in quantity, that the old channels 
 of importation by which the drains were formerly replenished are now 
 in great measure closed, and that the necessity of supplying China, 
 Madras and Bombay with money, as well as the exportation of it by 
 Europeans to England, will continue still further to exhaust the coun- 
 try of its silver." 
 
 XVII. 
 
 John Bright, "Debate on the Indian Budget," 
 August 1, 1859. 
 
 "The question assumes every year a greater magnitude and a greater 
 peril. We have what we have had for twenty years — deficit on deficit, 
 and debt on debt. Some day or other it will find us out, or we shall 
 find it out. . . . What we are now meeting is the natural and inevitable 
 consequence of the folly we have committed." 
 
i8 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 John Bright, "Debates in Parliament on the India 
 Question in 1853." 
 
 i" While Government had overthrown almost entirely the native 
 education that had subsisted throughout the country so universally, 
 that a schoolmaster was so regular a feature in every village as the 
 ' Patil, ' or headman, it had done next to nothing to supply the de- 
 ficiency which had been created, or to substitute a better system." 
 
 XIX. 
 
 John Sullivan, in evidence before the Parliament. 
 " Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Com- 
 mittee," 1832, voLI, pp. 65— 66. 
 
 Q. 503. "What are the disadvantages under which the people of 
 India at present feel themselves to labour with respect to the British 
 Government?" 
 
 A. "Their exclusion from all offices of trust and emolument and 
 from that position in the administration of the country, civil and mili- 
 tary which they occupied under their own princes." 
 
 Q. 509. "Does not the system which the Indian people have always 
 enjoyed under the British Government compensate to them in a large 
 degree if not entirely for their loss of the exclusive possession of offices, 
 to which under the native Government they considered themselves to 
 be entitled?" 
 
 A. "I should say that nothing can compensate them under such 
 exclusion." 
 
 XX. 
 
 Sir William Hunter. 
 
 " It may seem a contradiction in terms to say that the English who 
 pay at the rate of forty shillings per head to the Imperial Exchequer, 
 besides many local burdens, are more lightly taxed than the Indians 
 who pay only at the rate of three shillings and eight pence to the Im- 
 perial Exchequer, with scarcely any local burdens. But the sum of 
 forty shillings per head bears a much smaller proportion to the margin 
 between the national earnings and the national requirements for sub- 
 sistence in England than the sum of three shillings and eight pence 
 bears to that margin in India. In estimating the revenue-yielding powers 
 of India, we must get rid of the delusive influence which hundreds of 
 millions of taxpayers exercise upon the imagination. We must think 
 less of the numbers and more of the poverty of the Indian people." 
 
'9 
 
 XXI. 
 
 Sir Walter Strickland, 4I The Black Spot in the East." 
 Preface. 
 
 "During two years the writer has lived almost exclusively with 
 Asiatics and Eurasians, in Ceylon, the Straits Settlements and Southern 
 India; but the experiences thus gained has not diminished the con- 
 viction, that British greed and misrule in the East are the prime factors 
 of British Empire there, deliberately applied in order to ruin the peoples 
 they pretend to benefit." 
 
 \ 
 
 XXII. 
 
 lb., p. 4. r 
 
 " But think of the millions of pound sterling that would have 
 
 been saved, for there would have been no mutiny, as that glorious and 
 patriotic attempt of the great and good *Nana Saheb has been mis- 
 called by the English, to extirpate a horde of avaricious vampires, whose 
 continuous presence m Hindoostan is now realized by all thoughtful 
 and well-informed persons to have been the greatest disaster that ever 
 afflicted the country/' 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 ib., p. 35- 
 "The English Empire is like the Phoenician one. It consists of a/ 
 host of projectors and squatters, who overrun the lands of other people, 
 not in order to develop their agriculture for the advantage of the people 
 themselves, but to. steal their precious metals; and so whereever these 
 commercial brigands betake themselves the same phenomena occur. 
 "Where the English can carry out this system, the native popu- 
 lations gradually decline in prosperity or die out." 
 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 lb., p. 35. 
 
 " Let the English at home who read these lines reflect that, when 
 -they sip their deleterious decoctions of tannin, their cheap Ceylon teas, 
 I they too, in their degree are devourers as well of human flesh and 
 ! blood. It is not the tea alone, but the impoverished blood of the slaves, 
 ! denuded of its red seeds of life and vigour, that they are drinking, 
 i Were there justice in heaven, every drop they drink should be a poison 
 • to sap the virility of their race and reduce it to degenerate and harmless 
 \ impotency." 
 
20 
 
 XXV. 
 
 lb., p. sz 
 
 "We have also already seen that part of the failure of the English 
 
 to render races in tropical countries populous, prosperous, and happy, 
 
 / is due to the fact that, being primarily a commercial and industrial 
 
 people, they go to tropical countries to rob them of raw material and 
 
 not to develop native races and native agriculture. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 Ib.. p. 61. 
 
 "To the English, where wholesale massacre is not possible, to 
 emasculate a whole people seems to bring a sour joy in the doing of it, 
 such as priests and the less noble of the Roman Emperors revel and 
 have always revelled in. Strange perversity of the Anglo-Christian 
 mind, to which purity consists in staunching the sources of continuous 
 earthly being, and bringing to nought the bounteous power of the God 
 they feign the creator of it. To change something and to destroy 
 something, that is the ideal of progress of the normal English mind; 
 we shall soon see how disastrously it works when the English set off 
 on their missions of mercy and loving kindness, with- their tongues in 
 their cheeks and their convenient masks and wolf's clothing on, as 
 "benefactors of the world at large," that they may the more readily 
 impose themselves upon the peoples they have marked out for spoliation 
 and ruin." 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 lb., p. 62. 
 
 "Whenever I have been in a position to see the British empire at 
 work and study it at all close quarters, the margin beyond a camorra 
 of hypocritical liars, thieves, and murderers has been always more or 
 less microscopic; often, indeed, quite imperceptible." 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 Holt Mackenzie, his minute in the report ol the 
 select committee of the parliament in 1833, para 67. 
 
 "... Since the world began, there is probably no example of a 
 Government carrying the principle of absolutism so completely through 
 the civil administration of the country if that can be called civil which 
 is in its spirit so military; nay, which sets the people aside in the 
 management of their own concerns much more than the Sepoy in the 
 Government of the army. The principle pervades every act, from the 
 
21 
 
 highest exercise of legislative power to the appointment of the meanest 
 public officer. ... It seems to be vain to think that we can by any 
 legislative provision secure the community from extortion and vexation, 
 if we once allow or require the Government officers to interfere perpe- 
 tually in the minute details of the peoples' business. We have unfor- 
 tunately acted on an opposite principle, interfering in almost every 
 thing, neglecting popular institutions where they exist, and never 
 attempting to create them when wanting." 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 John Sullivan, "A Plea for the Princes of India,'' 
 p. 28. 
 
 "It is the settled purpose of the British Government to extirpate 
 the ancient aristocracy from the land — an aristocracy in comparison 
 with which, in point of antiquity, every family in England is modern ; 
 and as, by the laws of equal inheritance, there can be no permanent 
 accumulation of landed property in the hands of individuate — to re- 
 duce India to a state, in which the Governor-general shall represent 
 the Sovereign, the English officials the aristocracy, and the hundreds 
 of millions of people be reduced to the condition of the " lower orders." 
 The object of this fearful resolution is avowedly, money, and this object 
 is to be attained by trampling upon treaties which, as Lord Auckland 
 said, "speak a language which cannot be mistaken." 
 
 XXX. 
 
 lb., pp. 57—58- 
 "We have seen, from the examples of the annexation of Scinde. 
 Sattara, and the Punjab, that while Revenue is the professed object, 
 debt is the sure consequence of these spoliations % and it is upon the 
 people of India that this debt falls. It is the British Government which 
 has entailed upon the people of India a national debt — as to make it 
 necessary for us to fasten upon the people many most objectionable 
 taxes." 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 Robert Rickards in evidence before Committee on 
 "East India Company's affairs," 1831. Report of 
 Committee, vol.V, Answers to Questions 2795 — 2797. 
 
 "But I still maintain that any improvement which may have 
 arisen in consequence of the introduction of British capital and British 
 
22 
 
 > 
 
 enterprise into India, is nothing in comparison with what would be 
 the case if the people of India were sufficiently encouraged, and proper 
 attention paid to their cultivation and improvement." 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 lb. 
 
 I "I have already observed, that the improvements introduced by 
 Europeans are limited in comparison with what might be the case if 
 the people of India were sufficiently encouraged, but in their present 
 state of extreme poverty and almost slavery, it is not reasonable to 
 expect that any great improvements can flow from them. One of the 
 greatest improvements, however, of which the mind of man is susceptible, 
 have been made by the Indian people from their own exclusive exer- 
 tions. Their acquirement of knowledge is quite astonishing." 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 lb., Answer to Question 2825. 
 
 "Where the revenue is collected as it is in India, on the principle 
 of the Government being entitled to one half of the gross produce of 
 the soil, and vast numbers of officers, whose acts it is impossible to 
 control, are also employed in the realization of the revenue, it is a 
 moral impossibility for any people whatever to live, or prosper, so as 
 to admit of a very extensive commercial intercourse being carried on 
 with them." 
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 lb., Answer to Question 2827. 
 
 " It is anything but a moderate tax, for I have shown zn the above 
 mentioned work, it is in all cases exorbitant; and strange to say, in 
 some instances even exceeds the gross produce of the lands or plan- 
 tations on which it is." 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 Ib., Answer to Question 2928. 
 
 "You have stated that the tax is equal in some cases to the produce I 
 of the land; has land then a saleable value in any part of India where 
 the taxes take away the whole of this produce? — I am personally 
 acquainted with instances where the revenue assessed upon certain lands 
 has actually exceeded the gross produce. I have also known other lands 
 in India where a revenue has been assessed as being specifically derivable 
 
*3 
 
 from rice lands, plantations of fruit trees, pepper, vines, and other 
 articles, and each portion particularly described; but on comparing 
 the assessment with the lands in question those very lands have been 
 found to have been nothing but jungle within the memory of man. 
 Land, however, has a saleable value in those parts of India where our 
 revenue systems admit of some rent being derived from the land by 
 the land-holder or proprietor; but when the whole rent is absorbed 
 by the Government tax on revenue, the land is of course destitute of 
 saleable value." 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 Ib., Question 2840 and Answer. 
 
 " Under such a system of judicature, police, and taxation as you 
 have described, what prospect do you think there is of the inhabitants 
 of British India becoming either a wealthy, a prosperous, or a com- 
 mercial people? — None whatever; our local institutions, including 
 the revenue system, must be greatly altered or modified before the 
 Indian people can become wealthy or prosperous; if the conditions 
 of the Indian people, their habits, their wants, their rights and their 
 interests were properly attended to, all the rest would follow as a matter 
 of course/' 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 C. J. OT>onneli, "The Failure of Lord Curzon," 
 p. 16. 
 
 "Taxation, rendered necessary by the same 'Imperialist' furor 
 that now exists in England, over-taxation of the most grinding kind, 
 is eating out the life of the Indian races, and surely preparing for the 
 English nation 6ne of the most heart-rending problems ever offered to 
 man for solution, viz, the government of hundreds of millions of people 
 always on the brink of starvation." 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 
 Ib., p. 2\. 
 
 "The dominions of the Mahratta sovereign passed, under British 
 rule in 1817, the then land revenue was 80 lakhs of rupees (a lakh 
 being 100,000). The following year it was raised to 115 lakhs, and 
 in 1823 to 150 lakhs, already nearly double the native assessment of 
 six years before! . . . Writing nearly seventy years later, the government 
 of Bombay in its Administration report for 1892 — 93, page 76, gave 
 the following description: 'Every effort was made— lawful and un+ 
 lawful — to get the utmost out of the wretched peasantry, who were 
 
«4 
 
 subjected to torture — in some instances cruel and revolting beyond 
 description — if they could not or would not yield what was demanded. 
 Numbers abandoned their homes, and fled into neighbouring Native 
 States ; large tracts of land were thrown out of cultivation, and in some 
 districts no more than a third of the cultured area remained in occu- 
 pation." 
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 The "Pioneer," the semi-official paper of British- 
 Indian government in an article in 1877. 
 
 "Worried by the revenue survey, for heavily enhanced public 
 payments, . , . the Deccan ryot (peasant) accepted, for the third of a 
 century, the yoke of British tnisgovernment . . . Report upon report 
 had been written upon him; shelf upon shelf in the public offices 
 groaned under the story of his wrongs. If any one doubts the naked 
 accuracy of these words, let him dip into the pages of Appendix A 
 (Papers on the Indebtedness of the Agricultural Classes in Bombay), 
 A more damning indictment was never recorded against a civilized go- 
 vernment . . ." 
 
 XL. 
 
 Bishop Heber writing to Right Hon. C W. Wynn, 
 in a letter dated Karnatik, March 1826. 
 
 "In Hindusthan, I found a general feeling among the king's of- 
 ficers, and I myself was led, from some circumstances, to agree with 
 them, that the peasantry in the company's provinces are, on the whole, 
 worse off, poorer, and, more dispirited, than the subjects of the Indian 
 
 princes The fact is, no Indian prince demands the rent which we do 
 
 I met with very few public men who will not, in confidence, own their 
 belief that the people are over-taxed, and that the country is in a gradual 
 state of impoverishment. The collectors do not like to make this avowal 
 officially. ... In general, all gloomy pictures are avoided by them 
 as reflecting on themselves, and drawing on them censure from the 
 secretaries at Madras or Calcutta. 
 
 "I have sometimes wished that its immediate management were 
 transferred to the crown. But what I saw in Ceylon makes me think 
 this a doubtful remedy, unless the government and above all, the people 
 of England, were convinced that no country can bear to pay so large a 
 revenue to foreigners, as those who spend their wealth within then- 
 own borders." 
 
25 
 
 XLI. 
 
 W. W. Blunt, "India under Ripon," p. 6. 
 
 "Neitner Strachey nor Lytton had been able to convince me that 
 the immense poverty of the agricultural peasantry was not connected 
 with our extravagant English administration. This last, Lytton, in 
 his lighter moods, was fond of describing as 'a despotism of office boxes 
 tempered by an occasional loss of keys.'" 
 
 XLIL 
 
 M. Frederic Harrison, " National and Social Pro- 
 blems," p. 252. 
 
 "By enforcing prematurely a system of contract and foreign law 
 on the Indian peasantry, they are being pauperized and ruined." 
 
 XLIIL 
 
 William Digby, "India for the Indians — and for 
 England," p. 132. 
 
 "The viceroy (Dalhousie) compelled the Nizam to assign his most 
 valuable provinces as security for a debt which, it is doubtful, really 
 existed. . . . The average Englishman, strong in his belief as to the 
 honesty of British administrations, would scarcely believe unless chap- 
 ter and verse were given, and hardly even then, that such things could 
 be done as were done when the Berars were acquired by Lord Dal- 
 housie ... yet the wrong was done, the wrong is still unredressed." 
 
 XLIV. 
 
 lb., p. 165. 
 
 ■ Lord Dalhousie wrested from the Nizam the fairest and the most 
 prosperous districts of his dominions, to support a contingent the exist- 
 ence of which, a few years before, even Lord Dalhousie himself had 
 declared he could not defend. The act was high handed and unjustifi- 
 able." 
 
 XLV. 
 
 lb., p. 165. 
 
 On one occasion when the Nizam asked why the contingent was 
 kept longer than the proceedings of the Hindu princes threatened war, 
 the reason given for creating it, Lord Dalhousie wrote : - - ' I for 
 my part, can never consent, as an honest man to instruct the Resident 
 
i 
 
 n6 
 
 to reply that the contingent has been maintained by the Nizam from 
 the end of the war 1817 until now because the 12th article of the treaty 
 of 1800 obliged His Highness so to maintain it.'" 
 
 XLVI. 
 
 Horace Hyndman, " The Bankruptcy of India," 
 p. 40. 
 
 "We attribute all suffering under native governments to native 
 misrule; our own errors we father on • nature/ It was the mission 
 of the arbitrary bigot (Lord Dalhousie) to shock every native idea of 
 justice or good faith, to commence that course of unscrupulous annexa- 
 tion and wholesale Europeanization from which our Empire is now 
 suffering. 
 
 "The truth is that Indian society as a whole, has teen frightfully 
 impoverished under our rule, and that the process is going on now 
 at increasingly rapid rate. 
 
 "The famines which have been devastating India are in the main 
 financial famines. Men and women cannot get food because they have 
 not been able to save the money to buy it." 
 
 X^VII. 
 
 Horace Hayman Wilson, "History of India," 
 
 'It was stated in evidence (1813) that the cotton and silk goods 
 of India up to that period could be* sold for a profit in the British market 
 at a price from 50 to 60 per cent lower than those fabricated in Eng- 
 land. It consequently became nessessary to protect the latter by duties 
 of, 70 and 80 per cent, on their value, or by positive prohibition. Had 
 this not been the case, had not such prohibitary duties and decrees 
 existed, the mills of Paisley and Manchester would have been stopped in 
 their outset, and could scarcely have been again set in motion, even 
 by the power of steam. They were created by the sacrifice of Indian 
 ■ manufacturers. Had India been independent, she would have reta- 
 liated, would have imposed prohibitive duties upon British goods, 
 and would thus have preserved her own productive industry from anni- 
 hilation. This act of self-defence was not permitted her ; she was at the 
 mercy of the stranger. British goods were forced upon her without 
 paying any duty, and the foreign manufacturer employed the arm 
 of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor 
 with whom he could not have contended on equal terms. It is a painful 
 episode in the history of British India." 
 
2 7 
 
 XLVIII. 
 
 W. S. Blunt, "India under Lord Ripon," p. 435. 
 
 "The suppression of free thought and speech in India, by the new 
 press laws and the.revival of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment with- 
 out trial, is a subject I cannot let pass without a protest. Such methods 
 of government are not only repugnant to me, but are, I am sure, 
 as futile as they are reactionary. If persisted in, they can only mean 
 that the government relying on them has no serious intention of true 
 progressive reform. " 
 
 XLIX. 
 
 William Digby, "India for the Indians — and for 
 England," p. 255. 
 
 "The English people have not been suckled and brought up on the 
 Evangelical creed of Christendom in vain. The central feature of the 
 evangelical creed is embodied in the sentences : 'without shedding of 
 blood there is no remission.' It matters not in what direction the eye 
 is turned. This doctrine finds full exemplification. 'Without shedding 
 of blood', runs like a scarlet thread through every department of our 
 national existence: it marks every work we undertake and marks much 
 that otherwise might be wholly beneficial. 
 
 "In India we are exaggerating this national and Christian charac- 
 teristic. Even with ' shedding of blood ' there is no remission. Not 
 wholly for want of will does this lamentable state of things exist: 
 efforts are made, but they run on old lines wherein the benefit proves 
 for the foreigner and not for the Indian. An insurance fund against 
 famine at one and a half million a year is added £0 the taxation of the 
 country. First, it is pounced upon to pay a portion of the expenses of 
 a needless war in Afghanistan. Then, it is determined to expend the 
 sum year by year upon railways and other means of communication: 
 as though ironclads were, in a poverty-stricken and steadily drained 
 country, panaceas of famine, and as though the most disastrous famine 
 of the century had not. within our immediate recollection, occurred in 
 provinces fairly well supplied with railways. We take the people's 
 money to preserve them from famine, and all of it, except the mere 
 cost of labour, is expended in England for supervision, for iron or steel 
 railways, for engines and coaches; even the English investor finds an 
 outlet secured for his surplus cash — in a guaranteed loan in many 
 cases: where the loan is not guaranteed, the reason is because there is 
 a moral certainty of the projected line paying a dividend better than 
 is received from English consols. That is taking one shilling from the 
 
J\ 
 
 28 
 
 Indian people, and spending the larger proportion, say eight pence for 
 the profit of the English manufacturer and investor. Under such a 
 system, and in spite of the multiplication of railways, famines will 
 increase in the land, the last state of the unfortunate people will be 
 worse than the first, and the tale of blood exacted more and more 
 fearful. " 
 
 L. 
 
 lb., pp. 258-59. 
 
 "The long and dismal record of British prosperity heightened at 
 the expense of daily increasing poverty to more millions in India than the 
 British Isles contain, will continue. Some day, however, a catastrophe 
 more terrible than ought yet experienced, will occur. What form it 
 will take no man can positively tell. . . The English people will learn 
 by one way only. They would not displace the company of merchants 
 from supreme rule in India until there had been a frightful mutiny 
 due to misgovernment: In like manner the reform for which India 
 is ripe, which our experience in that country has shown to be above and 
 beyond all things necessary, . . . but it will not come until a great 
 shedding of b^ood' procures remission." 
 
 LI. 
 
 A Manifesto of the Executive Council of the Social- 
 democratic Party of Great Britain in "Justice," 
 August 27, 1910. 
 
 "British tyranny in India is rapidly going from bad to worse. Our liberal 
 d radical Government arrests patriots without accusation and deports 
 them without trial, outrages the right of asylum, and denies political 
 prisoners the right of defence by counsel, suborns perjured witnesses, 
 and defends the torture of innocent people by its police, puts down 
 public meetings, and suppresses freedom of the press. All the infamies, 
 which have been properly denounced by members of our present cabinet 
 when committed by Russia and elsewhere, are being perpetrated in 
 Hindusthan by Mr. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, Lord Morley, Mr. Lloyd 
 George, Mr. Winston Churchill and their fellow-ministers, without any 
 effective protest having been made in the House of Commons or in the 
 country. We have broken pledge after pledge to give fair treatment to 
 India. India has been steadily impoverished for five generations by British 
 robbery and extortion. The amount of wealth drained from India year 
 by year without return greatly exceeds the total gross amount of the 
 rack-rented land revenue. Enghsh Home charges, and interest on 
 
2 9 
 
 motley lent back to India alter having been pumped out of the stomachs 
 of the starving peasants, have rendered famine permanent throughout 
 vast regions where formerly dearth and distress came but fitfully." 
 
 LII. 
 
 H. M. Hyndman. "Bankruptcy of India," p. 74- 
 
 ". . . . That the people of India arc growing poorer and poorer; that 
 taxation is not only actually but relatively far heavier, that each succcs- /*" 
 sive scarcity widens the area of impoverishment, and renders famines 
 more frequent ; that most of the trade is but an index to the poverty 
 and crushing over-taxation of the people ; that a high organized foreign 
 rule constitutes by itself a most terrible drain upon the country." 
 
 LIII. 
 
 Rev. J. T. Sunderland (an Englishman;, "New 
 
 England," Magazine for September 1900 VoLXXIU, 
 
 No. f. 
 
 'The fact that at the end of two hundred years of commercial do- 
 minance and of more than forty years of absolute political sway, we are 
 confronted with such indescribable poverty of the people, and with famine 
 after famine of such magnitude and severity as to make the world 
 stand aghast, seems to prove beyond answer that England in all these 
 years has not made the welfare of India her first aim, but has subordinated 
 India's good to her own enrichment. We denounce ancient Rome foi 
 impoverishing Gaul and Egypt and Sicily and Palestine and her other 
 conquered provinces by draining away her wealth to enrich herself. 
 We denounce Spain for robbing the New World in the same way. But 
 England is doing exactly the same thing in India, and on a much larger 
 scale ; only she is doing it skilfully, adroitly, by modern and ' enlightened ' 
 modes of procedure, under business and judicial forms, and with so 
 many pretences of governing India for her advantage, and enriching 
 her by civilized methods' that the world has been largely blinded to 
 what has been really going on. " 
 
 . LIV. 
 
 J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., "The Awakening of 
 India," pp. 142 — 43- 
 
 "The heaviest obligations of the people are to the Government,, 
 and the weight of taxation is blamed for the poverty of the people. 
 We take in land revenue £20,000,000 per annum, £3,000,000 from 
 
30 
 
 salt, £11,000,000 from customs and excise, and have a net income 
 of a little under £50,000,000 and a gross one of over £70,000,000. On 
 the other side of the account we spend on army and military works, 
 not including strategic (sic) railways, a sum which is just short of 
 £20,000,000; it costs £6,000,000 to collect the revenue, and we spend 
 about £19,000,000 in England, not including the cost of stores for 
 Railway and Irrigation works. 
 
 The revenue works out at a tax of 3s 6 8 /*^ per head of the popu- 
 lation. This seems small, particularly when it is remembered that 
 is Sd of the sum comes from the land revenue, which is not a tax but 
 a rent. We must not be misled into an unwarrantable optimism, how- 
 ever by these figures. For the burden of taxation is measured not 
 by its absolute amount, but by its ratio to income. For instance, our 
 burden at home is about £3 per head; our income £40 per head. The 
 burden upon the British Indian is 3s 6 3 / 4 <Z per head — or, deducting 
 the land revenue, is io 2 / s i per head — whilst his average annual income 
 is not more than £2!" 
 
 LV. 
 
 Ib., pp. 145—48. 
 
 "It is unspeakably mean of us to place this burden on the Indian's 
 back simply because he must bear any load we put upon him. Nine- 
 tenths of the charge of the army in India is an Imperial charge. Canada, 
 South-Africa, and Australia should bear it as much as India. It is a 
 piece of the most bitter cynicism to find the Imperial doors of our colo- 
 nies shut in the faces of these poor people, who bear such an inordinate 
 share of the cost of Imperial maintenance, and at whose expense these 
 dominions are protected from the fear of war. If £18,000,000 of the army 
 charges were met by the whole Empire, we might look the Indian tax- 
 payer in the face as honest men. ... 
 
 "On the other hand, a little over a million and a half pounds spent 
 I on education is ridiculous! The small state of Baroda, with a population 
 1 of 2,000,000 souls, spends £660,000 on this, and has committed itself 
 I to a policy which will soon cost £1,000,000 per annum. In Baroda, 
 I education has been compulsory since 1904 — 5; while 90 per cent of the 
 I males and 99 per cent of the females in British India are illiterate! 
 
 " Our expenditure on education, however, is only typical. We spend 
 far too much of the income of India on Imperial purposes and far too 
 little on Indian development. 
 
 "On the whole, I think two charges can be substantiated against 
 us. Our Government is extravagant, and we have behaved meanly to 
 India. We charge the Indian tax-payer with the cost of the India office 
 in Whitehall — even with the cost of building it : we would never think 
 
of making such a charge against oar colonies; India has to pay for 
 Aden — and for Imperial embassies into different parts of Asia; but 
 the depth of meanness was surely touched when we tried to charge 
 India with £7,000, the cost of the representatives and guests from 
 India who took part in the coronation ceremonies of the late king." 
 "A mere recital of recent famine statistics is enough to appall one. '* 
 
 LVL 
 
 lb., p. 163. 
 
 "In studying famine, one must begin by grasping what it is and 
 how it presents itself. Even in the worst times now there is no scarcity 
 of grain in the famine-stricken districts. At the very worst time in the 
 Guzerat famine of 1900, it was shown by the official returns that there 
 was 'sufficient grain to last for a couple of years in the hands of the 
 grain-dealers of the district. It is, therefore, not a scarcity of grain that 
 causes famines/ In recent time famine has been caused by a destruc- 
 tion of capital and the consequent cessation of the demand for labour. 
 High prices coincide with low wages and unemployment, and people 
 starve in the midst of plenty. " 
 
 LVII. 
 
 lb., p. 178. 
 
 "That the general conclusion to which I have come. . . is that 
 economic rent is increasing; that the aristocracy and members of the 
 old trading and middle class are being reduced; that the cultivator is 
 being divided, and at one end is becoming better to do, at the other worse 
 off; that the industrial population ... is gradually drifting into the 
 same position as the European industrial population. 
 
 "Thus, the great transformation deliberately desired and striven 
 for by the western minds who have been squeezing India into western 
 moulds comes upon India— certainly not for its final benefit." 
 
 LVIII. 
 
 R. H. Davies, the officiating commissioner of Cen- 
 tral India. "A Debate in the House of Commons," 
 May 1867. 
 
 In a debate on the Mysore Succession, which arose in the House 
 of Commons in May 1867, the Marquis of Salisbury (then Lord Cran- 
 borne, M.P.) instituted a comparison between the British and Indian 
 systems of government in India, and pointed out certain inherent 
 

 
 32 
 
 defects in the former. The officiating commissioner of Central India, 
 Mr. R. H. Da vies, fairly summed up the argument thus:— 
 
 "A number of small well-governed states in India, would be more 
 conducive to the political and moral advancement of the people than 
 the present British Government, because — 
 
 i. The rudeness and simplicity of Native Administration, though 
 intolerable in Europe, have a rough and ready efficiency well 
 calculated for dealing with great emergencies, such as famine ; 
 
 2. and have a fitness and geniality in the eyes of the people which 
 compensate for any material evil which may co-exist; 
 
 3. migrations of people from Native States to British territory 
 are unheard of, while the contrary case is common; and 
 
 4. owing to listlessness, heavy-headedness, and extreme centrali- 
 zation, the British Government is, in a considerable degree, 
 inefficient, and occasionally productive of terrible misery, as, 
 for instance, the Orissa famine." 
 
 LIX. 
 
 Sir Richard Temple's Communication in reply to 
 Mr. Wyllie's circular of 1867 who at the request 
 of the Governor-general tried to gather data to an- 
 swer Marquis of Salisbury's assertion. 
 
 Sir, " In 1850, 1 was employed in the Allahabad district, on the frontier 
 of the Rajah of Re wan. In that tract, at that time our rule was not 
 more popular than that of the Rajah. 
 
 "From 1863 to 1867 I have been acquainted with the British dis- 
 tricts on the frontiers of the Native States of Bundelkhand, of Sindhia, 
 and Bhopal, and have never observed that the people preferred our man- 
 agement over that of the Native States. Indeed several tracts in that 
 quarter had been unsuccessfully managed by the British. 
 
 "I have recently observed evidence in the old Hyderabad records, 
 that after 1819, when the Peshwah's D6minions in the Deccan were 
 brought under British rule, our revenue settlements were in some dis- 
 tricts not successful, and did not compare favourably with some of 
 the Nizam's districts. 
 
 "In 1864, I passed through the Baroda territory and the Gaekwar's 
 Dominions, certainly that district, the valley of the Mhye, is in ex- 
 ternal prosperity hardly surpassed by any British district that I have 
 ever seen at least. " 
 
33 
 LX. 
 
 Political Report on the "State of Rampur under 
 Native Rule," 1832 pp. 36—37. 
 
 "If the comparison for the same territory be made between the 
 management of the Rohillas and that of our own Government, it is 
 powerful to think that the balance of advantage is clearly in favour of 
 tJte former." 
 
 LXI. 
 
 lb., Report from the Commissioners. 
 
 "While the surrounding country seemed to have been visited by 
 a desolating calamity, the lands of the Rajahs Diaram and Bagwant 
 Singh under every disadvantage of season, were covered with crops 
 produced by a better husbandry, or by greater labour, it should here 
 be explained, that the neighbouring lands alluded to in the report 
 consisted of British territory, already five years in our occupation." 
 
 LXII. 
 
 Sir George Campbell, K. C. S. I., M.P. in one of 
 his official reports as Lieutenant-governor of Bengal, 
 quoted in his book, " The ruin of an Indian Pro- 
 vince. An Indian famine explained." 1880. 
 
 "The result of Mr. Kemble's inquiries on the Nepal frontier is dis- 
 couraging, in that, after very fairly weighing the respective advantages 
 and disadvantages of both, he comes to the conclusion that the con- 
 dition of the Nepal ryot (peasant) is on the whole better than that of 
 the British ryot." 
 
 LXIII. 
 
 Bishop Heber, writing to the Right Hon. Charles 
 
 W. Wynn in England, in a letter dated Carnatik, 
 
 March 1826, quoted from Bishop Heber's memoirs 
 
 and correspondence by his widow, vol. II. 
 
 "But there is one point which, the more I have seen of India, since 
 I left Bengal for the first time, has more and more impressed itself 
 on my mind. Neither Indian nor European agriculturist, I think, 
 can thrive at the present rate of taxation . ... it is an effectual bar to 
 everything like improvement; it keeps the people, even in favourable 
 years in a state of abject penury .... the peasantry in the Company's 
 provinces are worse off, poorer and more dispirited than the subjects 
 of the Indian princes." 
 
34 
 
 LXIV. 
 
 John Malcolm Ludlow, " British India," vol, II, 
 P- 330. 
 
 "Can we resist the conclusion that . . . the condition of British 
 India, as a whole, is the reverse of thriving— -actually deteriora- 
 ting? . . .,Can we resist the conclusion that the most common vice 
 of the Indian people is one which spreads and grows with the breadth 
 and duration of our rule?" 
 
 LXV. 
 
 "Friend of India" (an English journal), 1851. 
 
 "In the two provinces of Bengal and Behar which have been 
 longest in our possession, and which have yielded the largest amount 
 of revenue — for one good road which we have constructed, we have 
 allowed twenty others to disappear. We have erected one magnificent 
 city, and every other city of note has been allowed to go to ruin." 
 
 LXVI. 
 
 W. Chaplin, Collector in Madras, and Com- 
 missioner in the Deccan in evidence, at the inquiry 
 of 1831 as to Indian fitness for official positions 
 in India. 
 
 Q 53 OI « "I am afraid that the nature of our government is not 
 calculated for much improvement. The nature of our government is 
 on fact, adverse to improvement." 
 
 LXVIL 
 
 Sir Walter Strickland in "The Indian Sociologist," 
 September 191a. 
 
 "In the last ten years from 1896 to 1906, the English have allowed 
 
 some fifteen millions of the inhabitants of India — that is a good deal 
 
 more than a twentieth of the whole population — to be sacrificed to 
 
 plague and famine alone. 
 
 ' "... Bishop Heber is said to have realised towards the end of his 
 
 life what British misrule in India really meant; one would have 
 
 thought that the appalling state of things brought about by the greed and 
 incompetence of the English in India would have shocked and appalled 
 even the most loathsome ghoul, glutted with human flesh and blood 
 that even the English would have felt some slight regret and uneasiness 
 

 35 
 
 at the frightful results of their handiwork; but so far from this being 
 the case, incredible as it may appear, so intense is the passion for death 
 and destruction among this people, that the terrific death-rate among 
 the serfs is actually a source of satisfaction and complacent pride to 
 this horrible danse macabre that calls itself English and the paramount 
 power." 
 
 LXVIII. 
 
 Rev. J. T. Sunderland (an Englishman) in the " New 
 
 England magazine" for September 1900, vol. XXIII, 
 
 No. 1. 
 
 "Again and again attention has been called to the effects of the 
 heavy and constant drain of wealth from India to England. . . This 
 drain from India has been going on and steadily increasing for more 
 than two centuries. There is no country in the world that could endure 
 such a steady loss of wealth without becoming impoverished." 
 
 LXIX. 
 
 John Sullivan, "A Plea for the Princes of India," 
 p. 67. 
 
 "Upon extermination of a Native State, the Englishman takes the 
 place of the sovereign, under the name of commissioner; three or 
 four of his associates displace as many dozen of the Indian official 
 aristocracy; while some hundreds of our troops take the place of the 
 many thousands that every Indian chief supports. The little Court 
 disappears — trade languishes — the capital decays — the people are 
 impoverished — the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, 
 drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them 
 down upon the banks of the Thames." 
 
 LXX. 
 
 John Malcolm Ludlow, "British India," voL II, 
 P- 335- 
 
 "The present system of Indian Government — cumbrous, wasteful 
 inefficient, and dishonest as a piece of administrative machinery— 
 has failed in practice in every one of the requisites of good Govern- 
 ment." 
 
 LXXI. 
 
 J. S. Mill, "History of India," vol. Ill, p. 316. 
 
 "English despotism is the cause of Indian crimes. The Penal Law 
 set up by the English in India is defective to a degree that never was 
 surpassed, and very rarely has ever been equalled." 
 
 3* 
 
 i 
 
 / 
 
36 
 
 LXXII. 
 
 "Indian Records," published by Mr. G. Bubb, 167, 
 New Bond Street, London. Preface. 
 
 "A debate on Indian affairs in the' House of Commons is invariably 
 marked with the characteristic feature of 'empty benches' and not 
 unfrequently with what is worse, a 'Count out.' 
 
 "This apathy has led in many instances to the government of 
 India adopting a course of policy which, to .Englishmen, lovers of 
 Truth, Justice, and Freedom is abhorrent and would in our individual 
 capacities be shunned equally with a deadly plague ; . . and English 
 talent and genius are, we regret to say, too often prostituted in support 
 of the cause of wrong and injustice." 
 
 "The great mutiny of 1856 — 57 was an outbreak entirely due to 
 the now well-known determination of certain powerful Indians no 
 longer to endure the insidious treachery of Indian Government policy, 
 and their fixed resolution to put a stop to, and to revenge the continuous 
 course of accumulated, although almost insensible injuries and en- 
 croachments perseveringly carried on against them by the East India 
 Company's officers. 
 
 "It has happened that things have been done in the name of Her 
 Majesty as Empress of India which are intolerable in any country 
 subject to British laws, and governed according to British principles 
 of justice." 
 
 LXXIII. 
 
 Joynson-Hicks. 
 
 "We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we should 
 
 continue to hold it 1 am not such a hypocrite as to say we hold India 
 
 for the Indians. We went with a yard stick in one hand and a ^word 
 in the other, and with the latter we shall continue to hold them helpless 
 while we force the former down their throats." 
 
 LXXIV. 
 
 John S. Clarke. 
 
 "At present Britain stations a huge army in India and behind that 
 protection she swindles the Indian people right and left." 
 
 LXXV. 
 
 v/ 
 
 James Caird, Report of the Commission on the 
 condition of India, 1879. 
 
 "We have introduced a system, the first object of which for a 
 foreign Government is necessarily the subjection of the people." 
 
rf 
 
 37 
 LXXVI. 
 
 Frederic Harrison, "National and Social Pro- 
 blems," p. 256. 
 
 "In twenty years and more we have sought to make our voices 
 heard when Hindoos were being blown from guns and hunted like 
 wild beasts. 
 
 "For a generation we have called out against the military oppression 
 of India." 
 
 LXXVII. 
 
 William Digby, "Prosperous British India," p. 27. 
 
 "The thin whips of the early days of our rule have become bundles 
 of wire thongs; the exactions of Clive and Hastings fall into insigni- 
 ficance by the side of the drain which, in ever-augmenting volume, 
 is over-enriching one country at the loss of the life-blood of another." 
 
 LXXVIII. 
 
 Major Claude Clerk to Mr. W. Blunt, in a letter 
 dated Not. 15, 1904. 
 
 "... I can see that all you say is as true now as it was then — the 
 impoverishment of the millions, and the reckless extravagance of their 
 effeminate rulers, living away from there in their mountain retreats 
 nine months usually out of the twelve. You may put down much of 
 India's woes to the farce of a government whose officials are perched 
 away in the clouds, absorbed in their own amusements etc., 'in the 
 hills/ and unmindful of their duty to the people." 
 
 LXXIX. 
 
 H. M. Hyndman, "The Bankruptcy of India," 
 pp. 40—41- 
 
 "The life of the Indian has become harder since the English took the 
 country, and will become harder still if we proceed on our present 
 fines. The taxation is already crushing, and it has become more crushing 
 in this present year. We overlook entirely the tremendous economical 
 irain which has been going on for a century owing to a foreign rule, 
 and we neglect to consider that, as land gets poorer, the assessment 
 lises in proportion to the produce. The dangers we have to face are 
 grave indeed; no exaggeration, no forced rhetoric, is needed to in- 
 crease the weight with which they must press upon us all. There is 
 
y* 
 
 38 
 
 evidence enough already and to spare, whilst we are staggering on 
 with our committees and commissions to a catastrophe which, unless 
 facts and figures utterly he, will be unequalled in the history of the 
 world. 
 
 "When poverty-smitten cultivators in one part of India are taxed — 
 permanently taxed — to support famine-stricken ryots in another, 
 who in their turn are to be taxed again for the like service, the whole 
 country' being drained all the while by enormous military charges, 
 home charges, interest, remittances, and loss by exchange, it needs no great 
 economist, no far-seeing statesman, to predict that a crash is inevitable. 
 The famines which have been devastating India are in the main finan- 
 cial famines. Men and women cannot get food because they have not 
 been able to save the money to buy it. Yet we are driven, so we say, 
 to tax these people more." 
 
 LXXX. 
 
 Major Wingate, "Our Financial Relations with 
 India," pp. 54—64. 
 
 "With reference to its economical effects upon the condition of 
 India, the tribute paid to Great Britain is by far the most objectionable 
 
 feature in our existing policy The Indian tribute, whether weighed 
 
 in the scales of Justice or viewed in the light of our true interest will 
 be found to be at variance with humanity, with common sense, and 
 with the received maxims of economical science. 
 
 "Were India to be relieved of this cruel burden of tribute and the 
 whole of the taxes raised in India to be spent in India, the revenue 
 of that country would soon acquire a degree of elasticity of which we 
 have at present no expectation." 
 
 LXXXI. 
 
 W. S. Blunt, " India under Lord Ripon," 
 PP. 253~54. 
 
 "The Government of India, as landlord, does practically nothing 
 for the land. All is squandered and spent on other things, and the 
 people who till the soil are yearly becoming poorer and more hopeless." 
 
 Ib., pp. 310—13. 
 
 "The Indian Government as at present constituted is a legacy 
 from days when the advantage of the people of India was not even 
 in name the first object with its rulers. Its direct ancestor, the East 
 Indian Company, was a foreign trade corporation, which had got 
 
 possession of the land, and treated it as a property to be managed for 
 
39 
 
 the exclusive advantage of its members. It was a bureaucracy pure 
 and simple, the most absolute, the closest and the freest of control 
 that the world has ever seen. But in 1858 the Government of India 
 was transferred nominally to the British crown. A royal proclamation 
 gave the people of British India their full status as British subjects, 
 but it has never been carried out, and the principle of Indian Govern- 
 ment remains what it has always been — that is to say, Government in 
 the interests of English trade and English adventure. . . The English 
 covenanted civilian is the practical owner of India. His position is 
 that of a member of a corporation, irremovable, irresponsible, and 
 amenable to no authority but that of his fellow-members. 
 
 "In him is vested all administrative powers. He is, in fact, the Go- 
 vernment, and a Government of the most absolute kind." 
 
 LXXXII. 
 
 East India House, " Observations on the state of 
 
 Society among Asiatic subjects of Great Britain," 
 
 p. 20, 1792. 
 
 "The primary object of Great Britain, let it be acknowledged, 
 was rather to discover what could be obtained from her Asiatic sub- 
 jects, than how they could be benefitted." 
 
 LXXXIII. 
 
 Danby Seym ore, in "Debates in Parliament on 
 the India question in 1853." 
 
 "One might go on for ever quoting in reference to the failings of 
 the East-India Company, for every part of their administration was 
 equally bad." 
 
 LXXXIY. 
 
 Davis, for many years in high office in Bengal, 
 and a Director. 
 
 On the State of Bengal under its native sovereigns. 
 
 " I beg it may not be imagined that I in any degree entertain 
 the opinion that Bengal was misgoverned until the English obtained 
 possession of it. The high state of prosperity in which they found it, 
 would, to every unprejudiced mind, sufficiently repel so gross a calumny. 
 For my own part, I not only agree with Mr. Hamilton, in thinking 
 the system under which those effects were produced to be still the 
 system best adopted to the genius and condition of the people, and 
 
/ * 
 
 40 
 
 that our deviations from it have been attended with inconveniences to 
 the Government, and evils to the people, which go far to countervail 
 any good to cither, that can be ascribed exclusively to the change." 
 In connection with this quotation see also Chapter II Nos. LXVIII 
 and LXIX. 
 
 LXXXV. 
 
 H. M. Hyndman, u The Bankruptcy of India," 
 P-3'- 
 "The East India Company had been, in the main, an economical 
 administrator, and the drain of produce from India to England during 
 the generation prior to its downfall was trifling compared to what it 
 was at the end of the last century, or to what it has been since 1858. 
 Parliamentary misgovernment and Capitalist loans at home, despotic 
 bureaucracy and wholesale Europeanisation in India, have been more 
 harmful by far than all the strange anomalies of the Company's Raj." 
 
 LXXXVI. 
 
 J. R. Macdonald, "The Awakening of India," 
 P- 232. 
 
 "Up to the present moment the Government has been an auto- 
 cracy, a despotism. On the governing and administrative author- 
 ities representatives of the subject have been in a minority; their 
 powers of criticism have been strictly confined within the narrowest 
 limits; government officials have held the offices which carried real 
 power. Up till now there has been hardly a shadow of self-government 
 in India." 
 
 LXXXVII. 
 
 H. M. Hyndman, "The Bankruptcy of India," 
 P- 157- 
 
 " India is very heavily taxed in proportion to its means. Taking 
 the average income per family of five persons at £8, then £2 is taken 
 for the purposes of government." 
 
 LXXXVIIL 
 
 H. M. Hyndman, M England for all," p. 144. 
 
 "But this drain must be staunched; taxation must be lowered; 
 more Indians must be employed; . . with one accord Sir James Caird, 
 
4' 
 
 Mr. Buck, Mr. Harman, and Mr. Robertson, all skilled agriculturists, 
 declare that the soil of India is undergoing steady and permanent 
 deterioration. Mr. Robertson puts the deterioration in Coimbatore at 
 thirty per cent in thirty years, and points out how the people are 
 driven to grow cotton for sale instead of food to eat, and literally to 
 starve themselves in order to pay the Government assessment owing 
 to this deterioration. . . From all the provinces comes the same sad 
 
 cry A deteriorated race of men, an inferior description of bullocks, 
 
 bear witness to the truth of what they say. . . 
 
 "Thus on every side the prospect is gloomy and overcast, and in 
 the opinion of the ablest observers we are drawing nearer and nearer 
 to an almost overwhelming disaster. Year after year we take from 
 India agricultural produce which she cannot spare, because we are the 
 masters of the country, and, paying ourselves handsomely all around, 
 leave those who depend upon us for safety to perish from want. Whilst 
 we are disputing about the defence of the empire — we ourselves are 
 preparing its ruin; the knocking will come through the darkness, from 
 without, the murder within will be done." 
 
 LXXXIX. 
 
 Sir Archibold R.Colquhoun, "Russia against India," 
 PP- 135— 3 6 - 
 
 "The present condition of affairs undoubtedly renders the struggle 
 for existence a hard one, as may be realized when it is considered 
 that a vast population of India suffers not only from the inevitable 
 droughts which so frequently occur,, but also from a narrow and short- 
 sighted imperial policy which places every obstacle in the way of in- 
 dustrial development and imposes heavy taxes on the strugling people. 
 According to various authorities Russia's demands upon landowners 
 in her Central Asian possessions are not so exacting as are ours in 
 India, for the British Government insists on a fifth of the produce, 
 making no allowance for good or bad years; while Russia is said to 
 ask only a tenth and allow for variation of production." 
 
 XC. 
 
 Colonel Briggs in 1830. 
 
 "A land tax like that which now exists in India, professing to 
 absorb the whole of the landlord's rent, was never known under any 
 Government in Europe or Asia." 
 
42 
 
 XCI. 
 
 J. KeirHardie, "India, Impressions and Suggestions, 
 p. 71. 
 
 " One of the glaring injustices in connection with the administration 
 >f India is the way in which qualified young Indians are shut out of the 
 igher paid posts in the civil service. Dr. J. Sunderland is responsible 
 f for the statement that 8,000 European Anglo-Indian officials draw 
 yearly salaries totalling £13,930,554, whilst 130,000 Native-Indians, also 
 included in the civil service, receive only £3,284,163. If it be alleged 
 that this is due to the superior ability of the European official, then I can 
 only reply that all the facts are against such an assumption/ ' 
 
 XCII. 
 
 lb., P . 5. 
 
 "What we have done for education in India is another boast fre- 
 quently heard. Here, also, so far at least as the older provinces of India 
 I are concerned, the boast is ill-founded. The total number of children 
 J attending schools in the whole of India, including the Native States, is 
 only about five millions, and the cost which the Government of India 
 
 spends upon education works out at about i 1 / 2 d per head! Max 
 
 1 Muller on the strength of official documents and a missionary report 
 concerning education in Bengal prior to the British occupation, asserts 
 that there were then 80,000 native schools in Bengal, or one for every 400 
 of the population. Ludlow, in his History of British India, says, that in 
 every Hindoo village which has retained its old form I am assured that 
 the children generally are able to read, write and cipher, but where we 
 have swept away the village system as in Bengal, there the village school 
 also has disappeared. That, I think, disposes effectively of the boast 
 that we are beginning to give education to the people of India." 
 
 XCIII. 
 
 Ib., p. 71. 
 
 "The Government of India in its present form resembles a huge 
 military despotism tempered somewhat by a civil bureaucracy. Every 
 attempt to win even the smallest modicum of popular rights is regarded 
 by the Olympians who inhabit the heights of Simla (the summer capital 
 of the Government) as a menace to the stability of the Empire." 
 
43 
 XCIV. 
 
 lb., p. 83. 
 
 "If Native States can provide free compulsory education, including 
 technical training for all their children, can give popular Government, 
 popularly elected councils to the towns and villages, and have a po- 
 pularly elected State Assembly, and generally conduct their business in 
 a way which would bring no discredit to any country in Europe, surely 
 British territory, with all the alleged blessings which British rule and 
 tradition bring should not lag behind. If those parts of India which 
 for over one hundred years have been under British rule are not fit to 
 be trusted with self-government, whilst those Native States which have 
 never been under British rule or which have shaken themselves free from 
 it are governing themselves on democratic lines, and if the people 
 inhabiting the Native States and those in British territory are one and 
 the same, surely this constitutes a sad reflection on British methods." 
 
 xcv. 
 
 lb., p. 90. 
 
 "... The main concern of the rulers of India is not the improvement 
 of the condition of the people, but the increase of the sources from which 
 revenue can be drawn." 
 
 XCVI. 
 
 lb., p. 94- 
 
 "As with the peasants, so, too, with the landlords where they exist. 
 They are made to feel in a score of ways that their presence is an offence 
 to a Government which exists for the protection of the people, and so 
 they are subjected to all sorts of imposts and restraints." 
 
 XCVII. 
 
 Ib., p. 83. 
 
 "Such, then, is the Government of India, bureaucratic in form, and, 
 as a consequence, harsh and exacting in all its relations towards the 
 people. To the heads of departments the people of India are but so 
 many seeds in an oil-mill, to be crushed for the oil they yield." 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 EVIDENCE ON THE SOCIAL, POLITICAL 
 
 AND ECONOMICAL CONDITION 
 
 OF THE PEOPLE OF INDIA 
 
 UNDER THE BRITISH 
 
 RULE 
 
Condition of India under National Rule. 
 
 The people of India, when we subdued them, were ten times as 
 numerous as the Americans whom the Spaniards vanquished, and were 
 at the same time quite as highly civilized as the victorious Spaniards. 
 They had reared cities larger and fairer than Saragossa and Toledo, and 
 buildings more beautiful and costly than the Cathedral of Seville. They 
 could show bankers richer than the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, 
 viceroys whose splendour far surpassed that of Ferdinand the Catholic, 
 myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery which would have 
 astonished the great Captain. 
 
 Lord Macaulay — Life of Clive. 
 
Lord Hastings, former Governor-general of India, 
 "Parliamentary Papers, East India Affairs," p. 157. 
 
 "We seem to have accomplished a revolution in the state of so- 
 ciety, which has by some unexpected fatality proved detrimental to 
 general morals, and by no means conducive to the convenience of our 
 Government. Since the first establishment of a zilla Court in the year 
 1780, and from the regular organisation of them in the year 1793, a 
 new progeny has grown up under our hand, and the principal features 
 which shew themselves in a generation thus formed beneath the shade 
 of our regulations, are a spirit of litigation which our judicial establish- 
 ments cannot meet, and a morality certainly much deteriorated. If in 
 the system, or the practical execution of it, we should be found to 
 have destroyed the influence of former institutions, without substitut- 
 ing any check in their place ... we shall be forced to acknowledge that 
 our regulations have been productive of a state of things which im- 
 periously calls on us to provide an immediate remedy for so serious 
 a mischief. " ' 
 
 II. 
 
 Lord Lawrence, former Viceroy of India. 
 
 "The mass of the people of India are so miserably poor that they 
 barely have the means of subsistence, it is as much as a man can do 
 to feed his family or to half feed them, let alone spending money on 
 what you would call luxuries or conveniences. " 
 
 III. 
 
 Sir Thomas Munro, his Life, vol. II, p. 58. 
 
 " Our present system of government by excluding all Indians from 
 power, and trust and emolument, is much more effectual in depressing 
 than all our laws and school books can do in elevating their character .... 
 We can expect to make no progress while we work with a feeble in- 
 strument to improve, and a powerful one to deteriorate. " 
 
 IV. 
 
 Sir James Caird, quoted in "New India." (W/V 
 
 "There is no class on which our rule has pressed harder than upon 
 :he native weaver and artisan." 
 
4 8 
 
 V. 
 
 Sir Henry Cotton, "New India," p. 109. 
 
 "The economic problem of India is the poverty of her people." 
 
 VI. 
 
 Ib., pp. 65 — 66. 
 
 "The prosperity of a country has no meaning apart from that of 
 the human beings who are born and dwell in it. To Englishmen the 
 country may mean the soil of India, with all that is above and below it. 
 To Indians it can only mean the people. This theory of identic British 
 interests denotes, no doubt, the advancement of Englishmen, but it 
 does not connote the welfare and happiness of the children of the soil. . . . 
 Indians have learnt by experience that exploitation spells economic 
 serfdom, and that British interests are hostile to their own." 
 
 VII. 
 
 Sir Edwin Arnold, " Dalhousie's Administration of 
 British India," p. 218. 
 
 "But the curse of poverty which we see without relieving, extends 
 far beyond the cotton mills. It blights India, and accuses ourselves. " 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Lord Teignmouth, " Minutes of Evidence (1813)," 
 pp. 2 — 10. 
 
 " I have always observed, that Englishmen are more apt than those 
 of any other nation to commit violences in foreign countries, and this 
 I believe to be the case in India." 
 
 IX. 
 
 Sir John Malcolm in evidence. Minutes of evi- 
 dence taken before the select committee 1832. 
 Vol. VI, 'pp. 30—31. 
 
 Q. 278. " In your opinion, was the substitution of our Government for 
 the rule of the Indian princes the cause of greater prosperity to the agri- 
 cultural and commercial part of the population? 
 
 A. "I don't think the change has benefitted or could benefit, either the 
 commercial, the monied, or the agricultural classes of many of the Native 
 States, though it may be of others. It has not happened to me ever to 
 
49 
 
 see countries better cultivated, and so abounding in all produce of the 
 soil, as well as commercial wealth than the Southern Marhatta Districts 
 (under native rule) ... I don't believe that in that country (central 
 India under native rule) the introduction of our direct rule could have 
 contributed more nor indeed so much, to the prosperity of the com- 
 mercial and agricultural interests as the establishment of the efficient 
 rule of its former princes and chiefs." 
 
 Hon. T. I. Shore, " Notes on Indian affairs, '* toL II, 
 p. 28. 
 
 "The halcyon days of India are over; she has been drained of a large 
 proportion of the wealth she once possessed; and her energies have 
 been crampled by a sordid system of misrule to which the interests 
 of millions have been sacrificed for the benefit of the few." 
 
 XI. 
 
 General A. Gordon to Mr. Blunt, "India under 
 Ripan," p. 326. 
 
 " You may do what you will. It will be of no use. India will never 
 be reformed until there has been there a new revolt. " 
 
 XII. 
 
 Lord Macaulay, " Historical Essays — Warren 
 Hastings," vol. III. 
 
 "Then was seen what we believe to be the most frightful of all 
 spectacles, the strength of civilization without its mercy. To all other 
 despotism there is a check, imperfect indeed, and liable to gross abuse; 
 but still sufficient to preserve society from the last extreme of misery. . . . 
 But against misgovernment such as then (1757 — 64) afflicted Bengal, 
 it was impossible to struggle. The superior intelligence and energy of 
 the dominant class made their power irresistible." 
 
 XIII. 
 
 Sir William Hunter, a former member of the 
 Viceroy's Council in 1879 in a speech. 
 
 "The Government assessment does not leave enough food to the 
 cultivator to support himself and his family throughout the year. " 
 
5° 
 
 XIV. 
 
 J. Sullivan, in evidence before the Select Com- 
 mittee 1853. Third report of the select committee 
 '853, pp. 19—20. 
 
 Q. 4866. "Do you suppose that they (the people of India) have 
 traditions among them which tell them that the economic condition 
 of the population was better in former times under their native rulers 
 than it is now?" 
 
 A. "I think generally speaking, history tells us that it was, they 
 have been in a state of the greatest prosperity from the earliest time, 
 as far as history tells us. " 
 
 Q. 4890. "You would restore a great deal of territory to native 
 rulers upon principles of justice? " 
 
 A. "Yes." 
 
 XV. 
 
 Sir W. W. Hunter, A speech at Birmingham in 1880. 
 
 "There remain forty millions of people in India who go through life 
 on insufficient food. " 
 
 V 
 XVI. 
 
 Grierson's statistics summed up by the "Pioneer," 
 a British serai-official paper in India, in 1893. 
 
 "Briefly, it is that all persons of the labouring classes, and ten per 
 cent of the cultivating and artisan classes, or forty-five per cent of the 
 total population are insufficiently clothed, or insufficiently fed, or both.— 
 It follows that nearly one hundred millions of people in British India 
 are living in extreme poverty. " 
 
 xvii. v 
 
 W. Digby, " Prosperous British India," p. 2 1 1. 
 
 " In India on account of the economic drain and British misrule 
 there are: 
 
 more preventable suffering, 
 more hunger, 
 • more insufficiently clothed bodies, 
 more stunted intellects, 
 more Wasted lives, 
 more disappointed men " 
 
XVIII. 
 
 Communication to the President of Council, Kast 
 
 India Company in the third decade of the eighteenth 
 
 century. 
 
 "It must give pain to an Englishman to have reason to think that, 
 since the Accession of the Company to the Dewanee, the condition of 
 the people of this country has been worse than it was before; and yet 
 I am afraid that fact is undoubted. . . . These appear to me the prin- 
 cipal causes why this fine country, which flourished under the most 
 despotic and arbitrary Government, is verging towards its ruin while 
 the English have really so great a share in the Administration. " 
 
 XIX. " 
 
 Sir Walter Strickland, M The Black Spot in the 
 East," p. 4. 
 
 "To me Ceylon is the island of desolation; when I think of it I feel 
 ashamed of being an Englishman. It is a monument, alone, of the 
 incorrigible selfishness and insatiable greed of the English squatters 
 in Asia, and their 'gouve^neu^s , who play into their hands, to the 
 detriment of the native population." 
 
 XX. 
 
 Ib., p. 4. 
 
 "What sort of government must that of Ceylon by the English 
 be when, after a century of it, the native popolation has dwindled to 
 something under three millions ?" "It is a horrible thought to reflect 
 that deep down in their heart of hearts the English are glad that three 
 hundred millions of their fellow-subjects in Hindusthan should be 
 half-starved, so that in case of another ■ mutiny ' they can be massa- 
 cred by means of repeating rifles and quick firing guns without the 
 fear of any serious casualties on the side of their Christian oppressors." 
 
 v 
 XXI. 
 
 lb., P . 25. 
 
 "It is a horrible thought to reflect that the English acquiesce in 
 the Tamils living half-starved in theii own country because their misery 
 there is the fortune of all the jobbing capitalists, sweaters, slave- 
 drivers, syndicates, squatters, mining projectors, rubber- and tea- 
 growers, and all the rest of the pious brigands and devourers of human 
 flesh and blood who swarm throughout the British empire, in a hurry 
 to get rich, make their pile, and carry the fat of the lands they locust 
 to spend elsewhere." 
 
52 
 
 XXII. 
 
 Halsey, of Indian civil service. (Official Report). 
 
 "I assert that the abject poverty of the cultivator of this district 
 is beyond the belief of any one who has not seen it. He is simply a slave 
 to the soil and to the Government." 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 W. G. Pedder, of the Indian civil service. 
 Central Provinces (Official Report). 
 
 "The people, if an almost universal consensus of opinion may be 
 relied on, are rapidly going from bad to worse under our rule. . . . 
 The ryot, who paid for them, lay a debtor in the Poona goal; or ate 
 the bitter bread of slavery." 
 
 V 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 G. Toynbee, C. S. I., former senior member 
 
 of the Board of Revenue and a member of the 
 
 Viceroy of India's Council. 
 
 "The conclusion to be drawn is that of the agricultural population 
 a large proportion, say 40 p. c, are insufficiently fed, to say nothing 
 of clothing and housing. They have enough food to support life and to 
 enable them to work, but they have to undergo long fasts, having for 
 a considerable part of the year to satisfy themselves with one full meal 
 in the day." 
 
 XXV. 
 
 C. J. O'Donell, "The failure of Lord Curzon," 
 p. 38. 
 
 "India is rapidly becoming a land steeped in perennial poverty, 
 and unless some strong and early steps are taken, the English people 
 will find itself face to face with annual famines, due chiefly to the 
 exactions of the State, to the oppression of the poor by the ' Imperialist 
 Empire-Builder.'" 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 Select Committee of the House of Commons 
 appointed in 1782 to enquire into the administra- 
 tion of justice in India. Ninth Report 1783, 
 Appendix, p. 120. 
 
 "George Smith, Esquire, attending according to order, was asked 
 how long he resided in India, where, and in what capacity. He said 
 
53 
 
 lie arrived in India in the year 1764; he resided in Madras from 1767 
 to October 1779. Being asked what was the state of trade at Madras 
 at the time when he first knew it, he said it was in a flourishing con- 
 dition, and Madras one of the first marts in India. Being asked in 
 what state did he leave with respect to trade, he replied at the time 
 of his leaving it, there was little or no trade, and but one ship belonging 
 to the place. Being asked in what state the interior country of the 
 Carnatic was with regard to commerce and cultivation when he first 
 knew it, he said, at that period he understood the Carnatic to be in 
 a well-cultivated and populous condition, and as such consuming a 
 great many articles of merchandise and trade. Being asked in what 
 condition it was when he left Madras with respect to cultivation, po- 
 pulation, and internal commerce, he said in respect to cultivation, 
 greatly on the decline, and also in respect of population, and as to 
 commerce, exceedingly circumscribed." 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 Sir Thomas Rumbold, in his "Letter to the Cout 
 of Directors dated 15th March 1778. 
 
 rf It will remain an eternal reproach to the Company's Government 
 in India, that it seems to have been a principle of their policy to drive 
 every Indian of consequence out of their territories. Let any man 
 who has traced the change from the happier days of Bengal and the 
 Circars to their present desolate and deserted state, come forward and 
 explain to the nation whose name and honour are deeply concerned 
 in the question, what is become of the train of princes, chiefs, and 
 opulent landholders which once covered the face of these countries? . . . 
 It would have been happy for all parties, if the same wise maxims of 
 the former rulers had continued to be respected after the cession of 
 the Circars to the company. The country would have flourished, and 
 the Company would have prospered in the prosperity of their tribu- 
 taries." 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 Sir Thomas Munro, his minute of 31st September 
 1824, vol. Ill, pp. 602—632. 
 
 "With what grace can we talk of our paternal Government if we 
 exclude them from every important office, and say, as we did till very 
 lately, that in a country (province of Madras) containing fifteen millions 
 of inhabitants, no man but a European shall be entrusted with so much 
 authority as to order the punishment of a single stroke of a rattan. 
 Such an interdiction is to pass a sentence of degradation on a whole 
 
54 
 
 people for which no benefit can ever compensate. There is no instance 
 in the world of so humiliating a sentence having ever been passed 
 upon any nation We profess to seek their improvement, but pro- 
 pose means the most adverse to success. The advocates of improvement 
 propose to place no confidence in the Indians, to give them no authority, 
 
 and to exclude them from all office as much as possible 
 
 "It would certainly be more desirable that we should be expelled 
 from the country altogether, than that the result of our system of 
 government should be such a debasement of a whole people." 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 J. Mill, History of India, Book VI, Chap. VIII. 
 
 "Mysore under the Government of Tippoo Sultan, was the best 
 cultivated and its population the most flourishing in India; while under 
 the English and their dependants the population of the Carnatic and 
 Oudh hastening to the state of deserts, was the most wretched upon 
 the face of the earth and even Bengal, under operation of laws ill- 
 adapted to the circumstance of the case, was suffering all the evils 
 which the worst of Governments could inflict." 
 
 XXX. 
 
 H. Wilson, History of India. India, voL III, 
 Chap. V. 
 
 "The apologists for the conquests of 1826 from Burma admit that 
 the provinces it was deemed advisable to exact from Ava were, at the 
 time of their cession, of little value; and they particularly observe, 
 that far from being hailed as deliverers, our advent was followed by 
 the disappearance of the whole of the population. " 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 lb. 
 
 " If we make a summary comparison of the advantages and disadvan- 
 tages which have occurred to the people of India from our Government, 
 the result, I fear, will hardly be so much in its favour as it ought have 
 been. . . . They have no share in making laws for themselves, little 
 in administering them, except in very subordinate offices; they can 
 rise to no high station, civil or military; they are more often regarded as 
 vassals or servants than as the ancient owners and masters of the coun- 
 try. ... One of the greatest disadvantages of our Government in India 
 is its tendency to lower or destroy the higher ranks of society. " 
 
xxxn. 
 
 Dr. Buchanan's account of Gorakpur quoted in 
 
 Montgomery Martin's "History of Eastern India," 
 
 vol. II, p. 547—549- 
 
 "It is indeed said, that during the Government of Suja-ud-dowla 
 the district of Gorakpur, was in a much better state than at present, 
 and that the rents having been farmed to Colonel Hanny that gent- 
 leman took such violent measures in the collection as to depopulate 
 the country, and I certainly perceive many traces of cultivation where 
 now there are wastes and woods." 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 Dr. Buchanan's Journey from Madras, vol. U, p. 388. 
 
 "The territory of the Raja of Cochin is so far better administered I 
 than that more fully under the authority of the company that neither 
 Moplas nor Nairs presume to make any disturbance. " 
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 lb. p. 388. 
 
 "With all the blessing which it conferred, the Company's admin- 
 istration committed the fatal blunder of overassessing the soil; and 
 the condition of the people under the Company's rule was therefore 
 one of hopeless poverty." 
 
 V 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 W. M. Torrens, M. P., "Empire in Asia." p. 392. 
 
 * ' A century of misrule has ended in a convulsion so terrible that the 
 best and bravest natures shuddered at its contemplation, and the 
 wisest and ablest servants of the state were those who said the least 
 about it. The whole of the dreadful truth has never yet been spoken — 
 will never probably be spoken in our time." 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 ib., p. 408. 
 
 "Meanwhile, what is the condition of the mass of the people? By 
 the confession of the latest authority, they are reduced to the lowest 
 point at which existence can be maintained. Penury, with all its attend- 
 ant privations, when the season is good, and pinching want bordering 
 on destitution when the season is bad, are the only alternatives of the 
 ryot's lot.' 
 
5* X/ 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 lb., p. 4". 
 
 "Misrule cannot exist without an overgrown army, and wasteful 
 military expenditure cannot live but by misrule. From first to last the 
 policy of conquest and confiscation has implied and required not only 
 an amount of force which good government would not have wanted, 
 but an amount of jobbing, under the pretence and name of military 
 expenditure, which good government would under no circumstances 
 have needed or allowed. Wholly apart from the enormous drain upon 
 the profits of Indian industry in the. form of emoluments boarded and 
 husbanded for private use at home, the resources of the country have 
 systematically been exhausted for the pay and keep of an excessive 
 military establishment, of which a great portion has at all times been 
 European. " 
 
 / XXXVIII. 
 
 John Bright Esq., in "Debates in Parliament on 
 the India question" in 1853. 
 
 " If a country were found possessing a most fertile soil, and capable 
 of bearing every variety of production, and that, not withstanding, 
 the people were in state of extreme destitution and suffering, the chan- 
 ces were that there was some fundamental error in the government 
 of that country. " 
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 Phillimoie, in "Debates in Parliament in the India 
 question in 1853." 
 
 "Under the native rule property and liberty were safe, robberies 
 unheard of, whether public or private, . . . that once happy country 
 at this moment is one dead level of uniform misery, in which all are 
 involved alike; and in the richest country in the world, from the con- 
 duct of the Government the House was asked to support, he defied 
 anyone to point out a rich resident proprietor. " 
 
 XL. 
 
 Mr. W.T.Thornton, " The Indian Tribute," pp.78— 79 
 and 92—93. 
 
 " It is established there is a drain from India to England. What is 
 its nature and extent? ... It is India's tribute which is so balefully 
 weighing down the Indian exchange, and that the same burden 
 threatens, unless speedily and materially lightened, to break the Indian 
 camel's back, miracle of endurance though the animal be. " 
 
57 
 XLI V 
 
 W. C.Bennet in "Ottde Gazetteer,"' voL I, p. 515. 
 
 "It is not till he has gone into these subjects in detail that a man 
 can fully appreciate how terribly thin the line is which divides large 
 masses of people from absolute nakedness and starvation." 
 
 XLIL 
 
 General A. G. Gordon, "Letters or General A. C. 
 Gordon to his sister, " p. 308. 
 
 "India is the most wretched of countries. The way Europeans 
 
 live there is absurd in its luxury I declare I think we are not far 
 
 of! losing it. " - 
 
 XLIII. 
 
 A. K. Connell, Paper on "Indian Pauperism, Free 
 Trade, and Railways," March 1884. 
 
 "Historians, whose ideas have been largely coloured by those of 
 the governing classes, have depicted in strong colours the short-lived 
 horrors of a popular revolution, but the permanent sufferings caused 
 by a governmental revolution have been for the most part sketched 
 with faint sketches. And yet the latter type of revolution leads to 
 more disastrous consequences than the former. If India is to escape 
 such a catastrophe, it can only do so by the Indian Government and 
 the British Parliament showing more consideration than hitherto for 
 native wants and ways. It is not more science, but more sympathy 
 that is demanded of us by an ancient civilization like that of India. . . . 
 Wherever we have superseded, wherever we have poisoned the social 
 organism with English reforms, instead of purifying it by the light 
 of the best native tradition, there the seeds of demoralization and disaster 
 have been sown broadcast." 
 
 XLIV. 
 
 Bishop Heber's Journal, vol. II, p. 361. 
 
 "The population (of Bhurutpur State) did not seem great but the 
 villages which we saw; . . . afforded so pleasing a picture of industry, 
 and was so much superior to anything which I have been led to expect 
 in Rajputana, or which I had seen in the Company's territories, that 
 I was led to suppose . . . that either the Rajah of Bhurutpur was an 
 extremely kind and parental Governor or that the system of manage- 
 ment adopted in the British provinces was in some way or other less 
 favourable to the improvement and the happiness of the country than 
 that of some of the Native States. ° 
 
58 V 
 
 XLV. 
 
 H. M. Hyndman, "The Bankruptcy oi India." 
 p. 194. 
 
 "I have written to very little purpose if I have not by this time 
 convinced all unprejudiced readers that the present state of our Indian 
 Empire is so dangerous, that it is the bounden duty of Englishmen of all 
 classes to look carefully into the facts. It is impossible to put aside 
 Lord Lawrence, Lord Canning, Lord Ripon, Sir James Caird, Mr. 
 James Geddes, Mr. Robertson etc., as so many ignorant or prejudiced 
 persons. Yet all of them have given it as their opinion that India is 
 a very poor country, and that we ought greatly to increase the employ- 
 ment of Indians as well as to practise the most relentless economy in 
 every department. " 
 
 XL VI. 
 
 "Moral and Material progress of India," 1874 — 75. 
 
 "The Calcutta missionary conference dwelt on the miserable, abject 
 condition of the Bengal ryots, and there is evidence that they suffer 
 many things and are often in want of absolute necessaries. In the 
 North-Western Provinces the wages of agricultural labour have hardly 
 varied at all since the early part of this century; . . . many live on 
 coarse grain, which is unwholesome, and produces loin palsy. This ex- 
 treme poverty among the agricultural population is one of the reasons 
 which makes any improvement in farming and cultivation so difficult." 
 
 XL VII. 
 
 H. Russell in evidence before the House of Com- 
 mons Committee 1852, vol. VI, p. 445. 
 
 "But no consequence perhaps of the introduction of our system 
 has been more prejudicial than the utter extinction it has occasioned of 
 the upper classes of society among the Indian people. . . . Every avenue 
 to creditable employment is closed against them, and whether in civil 
 or military service, they are equally excluded from distinction." 
 
 XLVIII. 
 
 W. S. Blunt,- "India under Ripon,'' p. 232. 
 
 "India's famines have been severer and more, its agricultural po- 
 verty has deepened, its rural population has become more hopelessly 
 in debt, their despair more desperate. The system of constantly en- 
 

 59 
 
 hancing the land revenue has not been altered. The salt tax, though 
 slightly lowered, still robs the very poor. Hunger and those pestilences 
 which are the result of hunger, are spread over an increasing, not a 
 diminishing, area. The Deccan ryot is still perhaps the poorest peasant 
 in the world. Nothing of the system of finance is changed, nothing 
 in the economy which favours English trade and English speculation 
 at the expense of India's native industries. What was bad twenty- 
 five years ago is worse now. At any rate there is the same drain of 
 India's food to alien moutns. Endemic famine and endemic plague, are 
 facts no official statistics of prosperity can explain away." 
 
 XLIX 
 
 Hon. A. A. Roberts, C. B. C. S. I. Judicial Com- 
 missioner, Punjab, "Correspondence regarding 
 British and Native Administration in India," 
 p. 112. 
 
 'The masses — the tenants, and farm-labourers, artisans, domestic 
 servants, and others, — earn, no more in British territory than elsewhere, 
 nought but a bare subsistence for themselves and their families. . . . 
 I doubt, whether the masses are so prosperous as they were before 
 the mutiny, or as they used to be under the Native Government. " 
 
 L. 
 
 Buchanan's Journey from Madras etc., vol. IT, 
 p 396. 
 
 "Mr. Hurdis thinks that present rents are greatly too high; and 
 no doubt, the peasantry here, as well as in almost every part of India, 
 are miserably poor.'.' 
 
 LI. 
 
 rj. M. Hyndman, "The Bankruptcy of India," 
 pp. 116 — 17. 
 
 "That famines are becoming more frequent and more fatal, that 
 taxation has reached its limit, that the revenue is inelastic and the 
 expenditure period for period steadily increasing; that the production 
 of the soil over large areas is lessening, and the margin of food above 
 the limit of starvation being greatly reduced, are hard facts no longer 
 to be put contemptuously aside as the idle fancies of so-called pessi- 
 mists. — They are the well-weighed conclusions of a special famine coni- 
 missiomr convinced against his will, the accepted truths of the English 
 Government which felt but now assured that India was rejoicing in the 
 fullest prosperity." 
 
6o 
 
 LII. V 
 
 lb., p. 152. 
 
 " India is becoming feebler and feebler. The very life-blood of the 
 great multitude under our rule is slowly, yet ever faster, ebbing away. " 
 
 LIII. 
 
 lb., p. 39. 
 
 "Where is the wealth of India? The cultivators clearly have not got 
 it, for they, as is generally admitted, can scarcely support the pressure 
 of the present taxation, . . . Indian investments are almost unknown. 
 Barely a fraction of the enormous debt is held by Indians ; the capital 
 for the railroads and irrigation works has all been borrowed in Eng- 
 land, . . . and the native manufactures which have been ruined by our 
 cheaper goods, are not yet, at any rate, replaced by new industries. 
 
 "The wealth of Indian bankers and capitalists is on paper only — in 
 brief, it is lent to their more needy countrymen. It represents the 
 capital required for the agriculture of the millions of small farmers. 
 If we trace downwards and downwards the wealth of the million banker, 
 we shall rind it at last in thousands of miserable bullocks and such like 
 investments, the working stock of a numerous but very poor people." 
 
 LIV. 
 
 Samuel Smith, M. P:, in a " Speech in the House 
 of Commons in August J 894." 
 
 "Only one man in seven hundred in India comes within the category 
 of £50 a year. I will make a further statement. The right honorable gentle- 
 man is well aware that in this country one penny in the income-tax yields 
 £2,000,000 sterling. In India it yields considerably less than £200,000. 
 India contains 220,000,000 of people under British rule. The people 
 yield on the income-tax less than one-tenth of what 38,000,000 yield 
 in the united kingdom. The meaning of that is that every million of 
 the people in India yield just one-sixtieth of what a similar number 
 yield in this country. If this is not conclusive of the poverty of the 
 people, nothing will satisfy the most exacting mind." 
 
 LV. 
 
 Rev. I. Knowles, London Missionary Society, 
 
 Southern India, in a *• Letter to the Manchester 
 
 Guardian" in 1890. 
 
 "In my own missionary experience I once carefully investigated 
 the earnings of a congregation of 300, and found the average amounted 
 
6r 
 
 to less than a farthing a head per day. They did not live, they eked | 
 out an existence. I have been in huts where the people were living on ■ 
 carrion. I have taken photographs of famine groups which are enough 
 for most people ; yet in all these cases there was no (official) recognized 
 famine. " 
 
 LVI. V 
 
 William Digby, "Prosperous British India," 
 pp. 121 — 22. 
 
 "My observations in Indian famines must be general in their cha- 
 racter rather than exhaustive. There is no need for an exhaustive 
 treatment in these pages. A small library of books has already been 
 published on the subject. I shall simply show that India, under British 
 rule, has become (the reader, will please, in his reading, carefully note and 
 emphasise the word) chronically famine-stricken, and shall furnish some 
 particulars, from official sources, which indicate that the famines of 
 the past twenty years might have been prevented if the course which 
 was strongly recommended to the Indian authorities by the famine- 
 commission on 1880, had been adopted. Following from these state- 
 ments is the deduction — of the truth and accuracy of which, sorrow- 
 fully, I am fully convinced that famines in India, under our enlightened 
 and all-embracing rule, are the direct result of our neglect as rulers to 
 do the right thing, at the right timj, in the right way." 
 
 LVII. 
 
 lb., p. 130. 
 
 "Official figures show over one million deaths on the average per 
 annum during the past ten years, or, two British subjects passed away 
 from starvation or starvation-induced diseases every minute of every 
 day and every night from January 1, 1889, to September 30, 1901!" 
 
 LVIII. 
 
 Ib., p. 140. 
 
 "Why is it that India is more liable to devastation by famine than 
 are other countries? — Because India is steadily and rapidly growing 
 poorer." 
 
 ux. V^ 
 
 Wilfried Scawen Blunt, "India under Ripon,'' 
 pp. 236—38. 
 
 " No one accustomed to Eastern travel can fail to see how poor the 
 Indian peasant is. Travelling by either of the great lines of railways 
 
62 
 
 which bisect the continent, one need hardly leave one's carriage to be 
 aware of this. . . . Nor is the aspect of poverty less startling if one looks 
 closer. ... In every village I heard of complaints of over-taxation of 
 the country, of increase and inequalities of assessment, complaints of 
 the forest laws, of the decrease of the stock of working cattle, of their 
 deterioration through the price of salt. The special evils which we have 
 imposed upon the Indian tax-payer are, however, only too apparent. 
 British India under the modern system is a striking instance of the 
 evils of absentee ownership. For the last hundred years it has been the 
 constant aim of the Madras government to destroy all ownership in 
 land but its own." 
 
 LXV- 
 
 J. R. Macdonald, "The Awakening at India," 
 P- 159. 
 
 "Sir William Hunter said that 40,000,000 Indians go through life 
 with insufficient food; Sir Charles Elliot estimated that one-half of the 
 agricultural population never satisfied hunger fully from one year's 
 end to another. From thirty to fifty millions families live in India on 
 an income which does not exceed 37^ per day. The poverty of India 
 is not an opinion, it is a fact." 
 
 LXI. 
 
 William Digby, ' ' India for the Indians — and for 
 England," p. 260. 
 
 " England in India is sowing bad seed; India, not England, is reaping 
 the necessarily bad crop. So strong is England, so weak is India, but 
 the laws of nature are defied and over-ruled. For a hundred years 
 this has happened, each year recording an increasing British strength 
 and a corresponding Indian weakening." 
 
 LXII. 
 
 John Briggs, "The present land tax in India," 
 PP- 349—416. 
 
 "The flourishing condition of the country under the Moghal Em- 
 perors is recorded by all the European travellers who have visited the 
 East within the last three centuries; and the wealth of the population, 
 and the national prosperity of India, far surpassing what they bad 
 seen in Europe filled them with astonishment. That the condition of 
 the people and the country under our Government presents no such 
 spectacle, is every day proclaimed by ourselves, and we may therefore 
 assume it to be true 
 
6 3 
 
 " I conscientiously believe that under no Government whatever, 
 Hindu or Mahommedan, professing to be actuated by law, was any 
 system so subversive of the prosperity of the people at large as that 
 which has marked our administration 
 
 "Although we have everywhere confessed that the heavy pressure 
 of taxation was the most cruel injury they sustained, we have in no 
 instance alleviated that pressure. So far from it, we have applied a 
 false measure for fixing the impost, that of money instead of produce; we 
 have pretented to abolish minor taxes on other classes, but have laid 
 the amount on the landholder, .... and in many instances deprived the 
 cultivators of the means they enjoyed of paying the heavy taxes from 
 which they sought relief under us, till by rigid exactions, we have in- 
 creased our own revenue and reduced the people to the condition of mere 
 labourers. This is the professed maxim of our rule, the certain and in- 
 evitable result of taking the whole surplus profit of land." 
 
 LXIII. 
 
 Montgomery Martin, "History of Eastern India, 
 vol. IE, Introduction (1838)." 
 
 "Since the official report (Dr. Buchanan's economic inquiries in 
 Northern India) was made to Government, have any effective steps 
 been taken in England or in India to benefit the sufferers by our rapa- 
 city and selfishness? None! On the contrary, we have done everything 
 possible to impoverish still further the miserable beings subject to the 
 cruel selfishness of English commerce." 
 
 LXIV. 
 
 A. H. Harington. commissioner of Fyzabad in 
 
 "An enquiry into the economic condition of the 
 
 Agricultural and labouring classes in the north 
 
 western Provinces and Oudh, 1888." 
 
 The same authority (W. Bennet) remarks: "It is not till he has 
 gone into these subjects in detail that a man can fully appreciate how 
 terribly thin the line is which divides large masses of people from ab- 
 solute nakedness and starvation. I believe that this remark is true 
 in every district of Oudh, the difference between them consisting in the 
 great or small extent of the always large proportion which is per- 
 manently in this depressed and dangerous condition. . . . 
 
 "I quote the following passage from some papers contributed by 
 me to the Pioneer under the head of 'Oudh affairs in 1876.' It has 
 been calculated that about 60 per cent of the entire native popula- 
 
/ 
 
 64 
 
 tion . . . are sunk in such abject poverty, that unless the small earnings 
 of child labour are added to the same general stock by which the family 
 is kept alive, some members of the family would starve. 
 
 "On the question, then, whether the impression that the greater 
 proportion of the people of India suffer from a daily insufficiency of 
 
 food is wholly untrue My own belief, after a good deal of study 
 
 of the closely connected question of agricultural indebtedness (vide 
 my five chapters on Economic Reform in Rural India in the Calcutta 
 Review, 1882 — 85), is that the impression is perfectly true as regards 
 a varying, but always considerable part of the year in the greater part 
 of India." 
 
 LXV. 
 
 A. I. Lawrence C. I. £., commissioner of Allahabad. 
 
 "I believe there is very little difference between poorer classes of 
 the people and semi-starvation; but what is the remedy?" 
 
 LXVI. 
 
 W. S. Blunt, "India under Kipon," pp. 201 — 3. 
 
 "With regard to the material prosperity of the people of the Native 
 States, as compared with British India, I can only speak of what I 
 have seen. The territories of the Indian princes are for the most part 
 not the most fertile tracts of India; and one cannot avoid a suspicion 
 jthat their comparative poverty has been the cause of their continued 
 immunity from annexation. . . . Poor land compared with poor land 
 I think the comparison would not be unfavourable to the Native States. 
 I was certainly struck in passing from the British Deccan below Raichore 
 into the Nizam's Deccan with certain signs of the better condition in 
 the latter. . . . The Rajput State of Ulwar, where I also made some 
 inquiries, was represented to me as being considerably more favourably 
 
 \ assessed than British Rajputana. . . . With regard to the town popu- 
 lation, I found the few independent native capitals which I visited 
 
 1 exhibiting signs of well-being in the inhabitants absent in places of 
 
 «. the same calibre under British rule. " 
 
 LXVII. 
 
 Meredith Townsend, "Asia and Europe." 
 
 "It is the active classes who have to be considered and to them 
 our rule is not, and cannot be, a rule without a prodigious drawbacks. 
 One of these, of which they are fully conscious, is the gradual decay 
 
«5 
 
 of much of which they were proud, the slow death, which even the 
 Europeans perceive, of Indian art, Indian culture, Indian military 
 spirit. . . . And the last and greatest one of all is the total loss of the 
 interestingness of life. 
 
 " It would be hard to explain to the average Englishman how inter- 
 esting Indian life must have been before our advent, how completely 
 open was every career to the bold, the enterprising, or the ambitious. . . . 
 For all this which we have extinguished we offer nothing in return, nor 
 can we offer anything. ... I firmly believe that to the immense major- 
 ity of the active classes of India the old time was a happy time." 
 
 LXVIII. 
 
 Lord Cornwallis, Governor General of India," Extract 
 from his minute, 2nd August, 1789." 
 
 C( 
 
 State of Bengal after twenty years of British Rule. 
 
 "I am sorry to be obliged to say, that the agricultural and internal 
 commerce have for many years been gradually declining, and that 
 at present, excepting the class of Shroffs and Bunyas, who reside almost 
 entirely in great towns, the inhabitants of these provinces were ad- 
 vancing hastily to a general state of poverty and wretchedness." 
 
 LXIX. 
 
 " Friend of India," an English paper formerly 
 published in India, April 1, 1852. 
 
 Present Condition of the Agricultural Population of Bengal, 
 
 "No one has ever attempted to contradict the fact that the con- 
 dition of the Bengal peasantry is almost as wretched and degraded 
 
 as it is possible to conceive The Bengal ryot knows nothing 
 
 of the most ordinary comforts of life. We speak without exaggeration 
 when we affirm, that if the real condition of these who raise the harvest, 
 which yields between three and four millions a year, was fully known 
 it would make the ears of one who heard thereof tingle." 
 
 LXX. 
 
 Sir John Malcolm on " State of Malwa," quoted in 
 "A plea for the native princes," p. 99 — 100. 
 
 "... I had ample means afforded to me, as the person appointed 
 to occupy that territory, and to conduct its civil, military and politt- 
 
66 
 
 cal administration, to learn all that the records of Government could 
 teach, and to obtain from other sources full information of this coun- 
 try; .. . I don't believe that in this country the introduction of our 
 direct rule could have contributed more, nor indeed so much, to the 
 prosperity of the commercial and agricultural interests, as the re-estab- 
 lishment of the efficient rule of its former princes and chiefs, who, pro- 
 tected from attack, are quite free in their internal administration 
 from our interference." 
 
 LXXI. 
 
 lb. on "Southern Marhatta Districts," p. 100. 
 
 "With respect to the Southern Marhatta Districts, of whose pros- 
 perity I have before spoken, if I refer, as I must, to their condition 
 before the last few years of Bajee Row's misrule, I don't think that 
 either their commercial or agricultural interests are likely to be im- 
 proved under our rule, ... I must unhesitatingly state, that the provinces 
 belonging to the family of 'Patwardhan,' and some other chiefs on 
 the banks of the Krishna present a greater agricultural and commercial 
 prosperity than almost any I know in India. I refer this to their system 
 of administration which, though there may be at periods exactions, is, 
 on the whole mild and paternal. ... If these men exact money at times 
 in an arbitrary manner all their expenditure, as well as all they 
 receive, is limited to their own provinces; but, above all causes 
 which promote prosperity, is the invariable support given to the village 
 and other native institutions, and to the employment, far beyond what 
 our system admits, of all classes of the population." 
 
 LXXII. 
 
 Sir William Denison, acting Governor -General 
 in 1864. 
 
 "The more I see of the state of things in this, the more earnestly 
 do I wish for alterations and reform; yet, the growth of abuses has 
 been so natural and so gradual, each step having been almost a ne- 
 cessary consequence of the preceding one, that it is difficult to know 
 where one is to stop. Many matters come before me which involve a 
 consideration of the treatment dealt out by us to the great men 
 of the land in former times, and which impress me with the conviction 
 that we acted towards them most nefariously ; but were I to attempt 
 to grant redress to the children of these, where could I stop?" 
 
frt 
 
 LXXIII. 
 
 J.KeirHardie, "India, Impressions and Suggestions," 
 
 pp. 1—2. 
 
 "We hear less now-a-days about India's great wealth or about the 
 great fortunes which merchant princes have been able to accumulate 
 there, but at no period of India's history has there ever been such a 
 regular soaking drain upon its people as now. It is calculated that the 
 British capital invested in India in railways, irrigation schemes, public 
 works, and undertakings of various kinds amounts to £500,000,000. 
 That, of itself, at 5 per cent interest, represents a burden upon India 
 of £25,000,000 sterling a year. By a burden I mean that the interest is 
 paid to bondholders in this country and is not, therefore, benefitting 
 the people from whom it is taken. Then, in addition, there are civil and 
 military pensions and other items, so that the estimate of £30,000,000 
 a year made by Mr. A. J. Wilson, of the Investor's Review, is certainly 
 well within the mark. Eighty per cent of the taxes in India are raised by 
 
 revenue assessment upon land The amount of taxes raised direct 
 
 from the peasant is from 50 per cent to 65 per cent of the value of the 
 yield of the land, in addition to which they have to pay local cesses 
 and various other small items, so that no less than 75 per cent of the 
 harvest goes in taxes. To most people this will seem incomprehensible. 
 A 5 per cent tax on income at home (England) leads to heavy and con- 
 tinuous grumbling, and yet the 5 per cent is assessed not on the total 
 produce of the land, but on the profits. What then must be the con- 
 dition of a country in which the tax is not 5 per cent on the profits, but 
 75 per cent on the harvest reaped? From time to time the revenue 
 charges are revised so that the Government may obtain the last penny 
 which can be wrung from the overweighted peasant. Increases of 30 per 
 rent are common and there are many on record of 50, 70 and even 
 100 per cent. It is this fact which keeps the people of India in a con- 
 dition of perpetual hopeless, grinding poverty." 
 
 LXXIV. 
 
 Ib., pp. 3—4. 
 
 "The outcome of this extortion is that the people are reduced to 
 such a condition of abject destitution as is probably not to be equalled 
 in any other country in the world, and certainly not in one which for 
 a hundred years has been under civilized rule. Sir William Hunter, who 
 was Director-General of Indian Statistics, put it on record that forty 
 millions of the people never at any time had enough to eat ; and Mr. S. S. 
 Thorburn, financial commissioner of the Punjab, declared that 'seventy 
 
68 
 
 millions of Indian peasants are in such a condition of hopeless poverty 
 that no reform can do them any good!' Testimony of a similar kind 
 could be multiplied indefinitely. In further support of this contention I 
 will quote the name of three living authorities, neither of whom will be 
 accused of having undue sympathy with the Indians. In 1882 Lord 
 Cromer, as he is now, declared that the national income of India worked 
 out at 36s per head of the population. Lord George Hamilton, in 1894, 
 whilst he was Secretary of State for India, gave the average at £2, and 
 this was endorsed by Lord Curzon, who, in reply to some figures showing 
 a lower estimate, proudly declared that the income of the peasantry 
 averaged £1 65 Sd per head per annum. Other estimates, only quasi- 
 official, put the income of the peasant as low as I25'6i per head. As 
 showing what this means, I may note in Great Britain the average in- 
 come is £42 per head, and that even in agricultural Russia it is £11. — . 
 These figures speak for themselves." 
 
 LXXV. 
 
 lb., p. 87. 
 
 " In forty years (i860 — 1900) thirty millions (30,000,000) of people 
 died of hunger in India — that, too, under the benign rule of the British 
 Raj. What number died of disease in the same period will never be 
 known, but all are agreed that the plague is now persisting and continuing 
 in a way and manner hitherto unknown, and I believe the cause to be 
 the growing poverty of the people.'' 
 
 LXXVI. ^ 
 
 lb* p* 90. 
 
 " I conclude then, that there is abundant evidence to justify the belief 
 that the condition of the Indian peasant has worsened under British 
 
 rule He finds his poverty deepening and the burden of life pressing 
 
 with increasing weight upon him, and not only is he without means of 
 resistance, but he has no organ through which he can voice his woes 
 
 "Plague, then, is in the main due to hunger, and that is a con- 
 dition of things for which our system of governing India must be held 
 directly responsible." 
 
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