Were Adam Smith alive, he might, and probably would, take some trouble to inform his countrymen that a system which looked to the exhaustion of the land of other countries, and the enslavement of their population, was "a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind;" but since his day the doctrines of the "Wealth of Nations" have been discarded, and its author would find himself now addressing hearers more unwilling than were even the men for whom he wrote eighty years since. At that time the imaginary discovery had not been made that men always commenced on the rich soils, and passed, as population and wealth increased, to poorer ones; and the Malthusian law of population was yet unthought of. Now, however, whatever tends to limit the growth of population is, we are told, to be regarded as a great good; and as the domestic slave trade accomplishes that object at the same time that it furnishes cheap cotton, it can scarcely be expected that there will be any change; and yet, unless a change be somewhere made, abroad or at home, we must perforce submit to the continuance of the existing system, which precludes education, almost eschews matrimony, separates husbands and wives, parents and children, and sends the women to the labours of the field.



CHAPTER XI.

HOW SLAVERY GROWS IN PORTUGAL AND TURKEY.

In point of natural advantages, PORTUGAL is equal with any country in Western Europe. Her soil is capable of yielding largely of every description of grain, and her climate enables her to cultivate the vine and the olive. Mineral riches abound, and her rivers give to a large portion, of the country every facility for cheap intercourse; and yet her people are among the most enslaved, while her government is the weakest and most contemptible of Europe.

It is now a century and a half since England granted her what were deemed highly important advantages in regard to wine, on condition that she should discard the artisans who had been brought to the side of her farmers, and permit the people of England to supply her people with certain descriptions of manufactures. What were the duties then agreed on are not given in any of the books now at hand, but by the provisions of a treaty made in 1810, cloths of all descriptions were to be admitted at a merely revenue duty, varying from ten to fifteen per cent. A natural consequence of this system has been that the manufactures which up to the date of the Methuen treaty had risen in that country, perished under foreign competition, and the people found themselves by degrees limited exclusively to agricultural employments. Mechanics found there no place for the exercise of their talents, towns could not grow, schools could not arise, and the result is seen in the following paragraph:—

"It is surprising how ignorant, or at least superficially acquainted, the Portuguese are with every kind of handicraft; a carpenter is awkward and clumsy, spoiling every work he attempts, and the way in which the doors and woodwork even of good houses are finished would have suited the rudest ages. Their carriages of all kinds, from the fidalgo's family coach to the peasant's market cart, their agricultural implements, locks and keys, &c. are ludicrously bad. They seem to disdain improvement, and are so infinitely below par, so strikingly inferior to the rest of Europe, as to form a sort of disgraceful wonder in the middle of the nineteenth century."—Baillie.

The population, which, half a century since was 3,683,000, is now reduced to little more than 3,000,000; and we need no better evidence of the enslaving and exhausting tendency of a policy that limits a whole people, men, women, and children, to the labours of the field. At the close almost of a century and a half of this system, the following is given in a work of high reputation, as a correct picture of the state of the country and the strength of the government:—

"The finances of Portugal are in the most deplorable condition, the treasury is dry, and all branches of the public service suffer. A carelessness and a mutual apathy reign not only throughout the government, but also throughout the nation. While improvement is sought everywhere else throughout Europe, Portugal remains stationary. The postal service of the country offers a curious example of this, nineteen to twenty-one days being still required for a letter to go and come between Lisbon and Braganza, a distance of 423-1/2 kilometres, (or little over 300 miles.) All the resources of the state are exhausted, and it is probable that the receipts will not give one-third of the amount for which they figure in the budget."—Annuaire de l'Economie Politique, 1849, 322.

Some years since an effort was made to bring the artisan to the side of the farmer and vine-grower, but a century and a half of exclusive devotion to agriculture had placed the people so far in the rear of those of other nations, that the attempt was hopeless, the country having long since become a mere colony of Great Britain.

If we turn to Madeira, we find there further evidence of the exhausting consequences of the separation of the farmer and the artisan. From 1886 to 1842, the only period for which returns are before me, there was a steady decline in the amount of agricultural production, until the diminution had reached about thirty per cent., as follows:—

Wine. Wheat. Barley. ——- ——— ———- 1836............. 27,270 pipes 8472 qrs. 3510 1842............. 16,131 " 6863 " 2777

At this moment the public papers furnish an "Appeal to America," commencing as follows:—

"A calamity has fallen on Madeira unparalleled in its history. The vintage, the revenue of which furnished the chief means for providing subsistence for its inhabitants, has been a total failure, and the potato crop, formerly another important article of their food, is still extensively diseased. All classes, therefore, are suffering, and as there are few sources in the island to which they can look for food, clothing, and other necessaries of life, their distress must increase during the winter, and the future is contemplated with painful anxiety and apprehension. Under such appalling prospects, the zealous and excellent civil Governor, Snr. Jos Silvestre Ribeiro, addressed a circular letter to the merchants of Madeira on the 24th of August last, for the purpose of bringing the unfortunate and critical position of the population under his government to the notice of the benevolent and charitable classes in foreign countries, and in the hope of exciting their sympathy with, and assistance to, so many of their fellow creatures threatened with famine."

Such are the necessary consequences of a system which looks to compelling the whole population of a country to employ themselves in a single pursuit—all cultivating the land and all producing the same commodity; and which thus effectually prevents the growth of that natural association so much admired by Adam Smith. It is one that can end only in the exhaustion of the land and its owner. When population increases and men come together, even the poor land is made rich, and thus it is, says M. de Jonnes, that "the powers of manure causes the poor lands of the department of the Seine to yield thrice as much as those of the Loire."[49] When population diminishes, and men are thus forced to live at greater distances from each other, even the rich lands become impoverished; and of this no better evidence need be sought than that furnished by Portugal. In the one case, each day brings men nearer to perfect freedom of thought, speech, action, and trade. In the other they become from day to day more barbarized and enslaved, and the women are more and more driven to the field, there to become the slaves of fathers, husbands, brothers, and even of sons.

Of all the countries of Europe there is none possessed of natural advantages to enable it to compare with those constituting the TURKISH EMPIRE in Europe and Asia. Wool and silk, corn, oil, and tobacco, might, with proper cultivation, be produced in almost unlimited quantity, while Thessaly and Macedonia, long celebrated for the production of cotton, abound in lands uncultivated, from which it might be obtained in sufficient extent to clothe a large portion of Europe. Iron ore abounds, and in quality equal to any in the world, while in another part of the empire "the hills seem a mass of carbonate of copper."[50] Nature has done every thing for the people of that country, and yet of all those of Europe, the Turkish rayah approaches in condition nearest to a slave; and of all the governments of Europe, that of Portugal even not excepted, that of Turkey is the most a slave to the dictation, not only of nations, but even of bankers and traders. Why it is so, we may now inquire.

By the terms of the treaty with England in 1675, the Turkish government bound itself to charge no more than three per cent. duty on imports,[51] and as this could contribute little to the revenue, that required to be sought elsewhere. A poll-tax, house-tax, land-tax, and many other direct taxes, furnished a part of it, and the balance was obtained by an indirect tax in the form of export duties; and as the corn, tobacco, and cotton of its people were obliged to compete in the general markets of the world with the produce of other lands, it is clear that these duties constituted a further contribution from the cultivators of the empire in aid of the various direct taxes that have been mentioned. So far as foreigners were interested, the system was one of perfect free trade and direct taxation.

For many years, Turkey manufactured much of her cotton, and she exported cotton-yarn. Such was the case so recently as 1798, as will be seen by the following very interesting account of one of the seats of the manufacture:—

"'Ambelakia, by its activity, appears rather a borough of Holland than a village of Turkey. This village spreads, by its industry, movement, and life, over the surrounding country, and gives birth to an immense commerce which unites Germany to Greece by a thousand threads. Its population has trebled in fifteen years, and amounts at present (1798) to four thousand, who live in their manufactories like swarms of bees in their hives. In this village are unknown both the vices and cares engendered by idleness; the hearts of the Ambelakiots are pure and their faces serene; the slavery which blasts the plains watered by the Peneus, and stretching at their feet, has never ascended the sides of Pelion (Ossa;) and they govern themselves, like their ancestors, by their protoyeros, (primates, elders,) and their own magistrates. Twice the Mussulmen of Larissa attempted to scale their rocks, and twice were they repulsed by hands which dropped the shuttle to seize the musket.

"'Every arm, even those of the children, is employed in the factories; while the men dye the cotton, the women prepare and spin it. There are twenty-four factories, in which yearly two thousand five hundred bales of cotton yarn, of one hundred cotton okes each, were dyed (6138 cwts.) This yarn found its way into Germany, and was disposed of at Buda, Vienna, Leipsic, Dresden, Anspach, and Bareuth. The Ambelakiot merchants had houses of their own in all these places. These houses belonged to distinct associations at Ambelakia. The competition thus established reduced very considerably the common profits; they proposed therefore to unite themselves under one central commercial administration. Twenty years ago this plan was suggested, and in a year afterward it was carried into execution. The lowest shares in this joint-stock company were five thousand piastres, (between 600 and 700,) and the highest were restricted to twenty thousand, that the capitalists might not swallow up all the profits. The workmen subscribed their little profits, and uniting in societies, purchased single shares; and besides their capital, their labour was reckoned in the general amount; they received their share of the profits accordingly, and abundance was soon spread through the whole community. The dividends were at first restricted to ten per cent., and the surplus profit was applied to the augmenting of the capital; which in two years was raised from 600,000 to 1,000,000 piastres, (120,000.)'

"It supplied industrious Germany, not by the perfection of its jennies, but by the industry of its spindle and distaff. It taught Montpellier the art of dyeing, not from experimental chairs, but because dyeing was with it a domestic and culinary operation, subject to daily observation in every kitchen; and by the simplicity and honesty, not the science of its system, it reads a lesson to commercial associations, and holds up an example unparalleled in the commercial history of Europe, of a joint-stock and labour company; ably and economically and successfully administered, in which the interests of industry and capital were, long equally represented. Yet the system of administration with which all this is connected, is common to the thousand hamlets of Thessaly that have not emerged from their insignificance; but Ambelakia for twenty years was left alone."[52]

At that time, however, England had invented new machinery for spinning cotton, and, by prohibiting its export, had provided that all the cotton of the world should be brought to Manchester before it could be cheaply converted into cloth.

The cotton manufacturers at Ambelakia had their difficulties to encounter, but all those might have been overcome had they not, says Mr. Urquhart, "been outstripped by Manchester." They were outstripped, and twenty years afterward, not only had that place been deserted, but others in its neighbourhood were reduced to complete desolation. Native manufactories for the production of cotton goods had, indeed, almost ceased to work. Of 600 looms at Sentari in 1812, but 40 remained in 1821; and of the 2000 weaving establishments at Tournovo in 1812, but 200 remained in 1830.[53] For a time, cotton went abroad to be returned in the form of twist, thus making a voyage of thousands of miles in search of a spindle; but even this trade has in a great degree passed away. As a consequence of these things there had been a ruinous fall of wages, affecting all classes of labourers. "The profits," says Mr. Urquhart—

"Have been reduced to one-half, and sometimes to one-third, by the introduction of English cottons, which, though they have reduced the home price, and arrested the export of cotton-yarn from Turkey, have not yet supplanted the home manufacture in any visible degree; for, until tranquillity has allowed agriculture to revive, the people must go on working merely for bread, and reducing their price, in a struggle of hopeless competition. The industry, however, of the women and children is most remarkable; in every interval of labour, tending the cattle, carrying water, the spindle and distaff, as in the days of Xerxes, is never out of their hands. The children are as assiduously at work, from the moment their little fingers, can turn the spindle. About Ambelakia, the former focus of the cotton-yarn trade, the peasantry has suffered dreadfully from this, though formerly the women could earn as much in-doors, as their husbands in the field; at present, their daily profit (1881) does not exceed twenty paras, if realized, for often they cannot dispose of the yarn when spun.

Piastres. Paras. ————- ——— Five okes of uncleaned cotton, at seventeen paras.......................... 2 5 Labour of a woman for two days, (seven farthings per day)................... 0 35 Carding, by vibrations of a cat-gut........... 0 10 Spinning, a woman's unremitting labour for a week.................................. 5 30 Loss of cotton, exceeding an oke of uncleaned cotton......................... 0 20 ———— ——— Value of one oke of uncleaned cotton.... Prs. 9 00

"Here a woman's labour makes but 2d. per day, while field- labour, according to the season of the year, ranges from 4d. to 6d. and at this rate, the pound of coarse cotton-yarn cost in spinning 5d."—P. 147.

The labour of a woman is estimated at less than four cents per day, and "the unremitting labour of a week" will command but twenty-five cents. The wages of men employed in gathering leaves and attending silkworms are stated at one piastre (five cents) per day. At Salonica, the shipping port of Thessaly, they were ten cents. (Urquhart, 268.)

As a necessary consequence of this, population diminishes, and everywhere are seen the ruins of once prosperous villages. Agriculture declines from day to day. The once productive cotton-fields of Thessaly lie untilled, and even around Constantinople itself—

"There are no cultivated lands to speak of within twenty miles, in some directions within fifty miles. The commonest necessaries of life come from distant parts: the corn for daily bread from Odessa; the cattle and sheep from beyond Adrianople, or from Asia Minor; the rice, of which such a vast consumption is made, from the neighbourhood of Phillippopolis; the poultry chiefly from Bulgaria; the fruit and vegetables from Nicomedia and Mondania. Thus a constant drain of money is occasioned, without any visible return except to the treasury or from the property of the Ulema."—Slade's Travels in Turkey, vol. ii. 143.

The silk that is made is badly prepared, because the distance of the artisan prevents the poor people from obtaining good machinery; and as a consequence of this, the former direct trade with Persia has been superseded by an indirect one through England, to which the raw silk has now to be sent. In every department of industry we see the same result. Birmingham has superseded Damascus, whose blades are now no longer made.

Not only is the foreigner free to introduce his wares, but he may, on payment of a trifling duty of two per cent., carry them throughout the empire until finally disposed of. He travels by caravans, and is lodged without expense. He brings his goods to be exchanged for money, or what else he needs, and the exchange effected, he disappears as suddenly as he came.

"It is impossible," says Mr. Urquhart, "to witness the arrival of the many-tongued caravan at its resting-place for the night, and see, unladen and piled up together, the bales from such distant places—to glance over their very wrappers, and the strange marks and characters which they bear—without being amazed at so eloquent a contradiction of our preconceived notions of indiscriminate despotism and universal insecurity of the East. But while we observe the avidity with which our goods are sought, the preference now transferred from Indian to Birmingham muslins, from Golconda to Glasgow chintzes, from Damascus to Sheffield steel, from Cashmere shawls to English broadcloth; and while, at the same time, the energies of their commercial spirit are brought thus substantially before us; it is indeed impossible not to regret that a gulf of separation should have so long divided the East and the West, and equally impossible not to indulge in the hope and anticipation of a vastly extended traffic with the East, and of all the blessings which follow fast and welling in the wake of commerce."—P. 133.

Among the "blessings" of the system is the fact that local places of exchange no longer exist. The storekeeper who pays rent and taxes has found himself unable to compete with the pedler who pays neither; and the consequence is that the poor cultivator finds it impossible to exchange his products, small as they are, for the commodities he needs, except, on the occasional arrival of a caravan, and that has generally proved far more likely to absorb the little money in circulation, than any of the more bulky and less valuable products of the earth.

As usual in purely agricultural countries, the whole body of cultivators is hopelessly in debt, and the money-lender fleeces all. If he aids the peasant before harvest, he must have an enormous interest, and be paid in produce at a large discount from the market price; The village communities are almost universally in debt, but to them, as the security is good, the banker charges only twenty per cent. per annum. Turkey is the very paradise of middlemen—a consequence of the absence of any mode of employment except in cultivation or in trade; and the moral effect of this may be seen in the following passage:—

"If you see," says Urquhart, "a Turk meditating in a corner, it is on some speculation—the purchase of a revenue farm, or the propriety of a loan at sixty per cent.; if you see pen or paper in his hand, it is making or checking an account; if there is a disturbance in the street, it is a disputed barter; whether in the streets or in-doors, whether in a coffeehouse, a serai, or a bazaar, whatever the rank, nation, language of the persons around you, traffic, barter, gain are the prevailing impulses; grusch, para, florin, lira, asper, amid the Babel of tongues, are the universally intelligible sounds."—P. 138.

We have thus a whole people divided into two classes—the plunderers and the plundered; and the cause of this may be found in the fact that the owners and occupants of land have never been permitted to strengthen themselves by the formation of that natural alliance between the plough and the loom, the hammer and the harrow, so much admired by Adam Smith. The government is as weak as the people, for it is so entirely dependent on the bankers, that they may be regarded as the real owners of the land and the people, taxing them at discretion; and to them certainly enure all the profits of cultivation. As a consequence of this, the land is almost valueless. A recent traveller states that good land maybe purchased in the immediate vicinity of Smyrna at six cents an acre, and at a little distance vast quantities may be had for nothing. Throughout the world, the freedom of man has grown in the ratio of the increase in the value of land, and that has always grown in the ratio of the tendency to have the artisan take his place by the side of the cultivator of the earth. Whatever tends to prevent this natural association tends, therefore, to the debasement and enslavement of man.

The weakness of Turkey, as regards foreign nations, is great, and it increases every day.[54] Not only ambassadors, but consuls, beard it in its own cities; and it is now even denied that she has any right to adopt a system of trade different from that under which she has become thus weakened. Perfect freedom of commerce is declared to be "one of those immunities which we can resign on no account or pretext whatever; it is a golden privilege, which we can never abandon."[55]

Internal trade scarcely exists; and, as a natural consequence, the foreign one is insignificant, the whole value of the exports being but about thirty-three millions of dollars, or less than two dollars per head. The total exports from Great Britain in the last year amounted to but 2,221,000, ($11,500,000,) much of which was simply en route for Persia; and this constitutes the great trade that has been built up at so much cost to the people of Turkey, and that is to be maintained as "a golden privilege" not to be abandoned! Not discouraged by the result of past efforts, the same author looks forward anxiously for the time when there shall be in Turkey no employment in manufactures of any kind, and when the people shall be exclusively employed in agriculture; and that time cannot, he thinks, be far distant, as "a few pence more or less in the price of a commodity will make the difference of purchasing or manufacturing at home."[56]

Throughout his book he shows that the rudeness of the machinery of cultivation is in the direct ratio of the distance of the cultivator from market; and yet he would desire that all the produce of the country should go to a distant market to be exchanged, although the whole import of iron at the present moment for the supply of a population of almost twenty millions of people, possessing iron ore, fuel, and unemployed labour in unlimited quantity, is but 2500 per annum, or about a penny's worth for every thirty persons! Need we wonder at the character of the machinery, the poverty and slavery of the people, the trivial amount of commerce, or at the weakness of a government whose whole system looks to the exhaustion of the land, and to the exclusion of that great middle class of working-men, to whom the agriculturist has everywhere been indebted for his freedom?

The facts thus far given have been taken, as the reader will have observed, from Mr. Urquhart's work; and as that gentleman is a warm admirer of the system denounced by Adam Smith, he cannot be suspected of any exaggeration when presenting any of its unfavourable results. Later travellers exhibit the nation as passing steadily onward toward ruin, and the people toward a state of slavery the most, complete—the necessary consequence of a policy that excludes the mechanic and prevents the formation of a town population. Among the latest of those travellers is Mr. Mac Farlane,[57] at the date of whose visit the silk manufacture had entirely disappeared, and even the filatures for preparing the raw silk were closed, weavers having become ploughmen, and women and children having been totally deprived of employment. The cultivators of silk had become entirely dependent on foreign markets in which there existed no demand for the products of their land and labour. England was then passing through one of her periodical crises, and it had been deemed necessary to put down the prices of all agricultural products, with a view to stop importation. On one occasion, during Mr. Mac Farlane's travels, there came a report that silk had risen in England, and it produced a momentary stir and animation, that, as he says, "flattered his national vanity to think that an electric touch parting from London, the mighty heart of commerce, should thus be felt in a few days at a place like Biljek." Such is commercial centralization! It renders the agriculturists of the world mere slaves, dependent for food and clothing upon the will of a few people, proprietors of a small amount of machinery, at "the mighty heart of commerce." At one moment speculation is rife, and silk goes up in price, and then every effort is made to induce large shipments of the raw produce of the world. At the next, money is said to be scarce, and the shippers are ruined, as was, to so great an extent, experienced by those who exported corn from this country in 1847.

At the date of the traveller's first visit to Broussa, the villages were numerous, and the silk manufacture was prosperous. At the second, the silk works were stopped and their owners bankrupt, the villages were gradually disappearing, and in the town itself scarcely a chimney was left, while the country around presented to view nothing but poverty and wretchedness. Everywhere, throughout the empire, the roads are bad, and becoming worse, and the condition of the cultivator deteriorates; for if he has a surplus to sell, most of its value at market is absorbed by the cost of transportation, and if his crop is short, prices rise so high that he cannot purchase. Famines are therefore frequent, and child-murder prevails throughout all classes of society. Population therefore diminishes, and the best lands are abandoned, "nine-tenths" of them remaining untilled;[58] the natural consequence of which is, that malaria prevails in many of those parts of the country that once were most productive, and pestilence comes in aid of famine for the extermination of this unfortunate people. Native mechanics are nowhere to be found, there being no demand for them, and the plough, the wine-press, and the oil-mill are equally rude and barbarous. The product of labour is, consequently, most diminutive, and its wages twopence a day, with a little food. The interest of money varies from 25 to 50 per cent. per annum, and this rate is frequently paid for the loan of bad seed that yields but little to either land or labour.

With the decline of population and the disappearance of all the local places of exchange, the pressure of the conscription becomes from year to year more severe, and droves of men may be seen "chained like wild beasts—free Osmanlees driven along the road like slaves to a market"—free men, separated from wives and children, who are left to perish of starvation amid the richest lands, that remain untilled because of the separation of the artisan from the producer of food, silk, and cotton. Internal commerce is trifling in amount, and the power to pay for foreign merchandise has almost passed away. Land is nearly valueless; and in this we find the most convincing proof of the daily increasing tendency toward slavery, man having always become enslaved as land has lost its value. In the great valley of Buyuk-der, once known as the fair land, a property of twenty miles in circumference had shortly before his visit been purchased for less than 1000, or $4800.[59] In another part of the country, one of twelve miles in circumference had been purchased for a considerably smaller sum.[60] The slave trade, black and white, had never been more active;[61] and this was a necessary consequence of the decline in the value of labour and land.

In this country, negro men are well fed, clothed, and lodged, and are gradually advancing toward freedom. Population therefore increases, although more slowly than would be the case were they enabled more to combine their efforts for the improvement of their condition. In the West Indies, Portugal, and Turkey, being neither well fed, clothed, nor lodged, their condition declines; and as they can neither be bought nor sold, they are allowed to die off, and population diminishes as the tendency toward the subjugation of the labourer becomes more and more complete. Which of these conditions tends most to favour advance in civilization the reader may decide.



CHAPTER XII.

HOW SLAVERY GROWS IN INDIA.

In no part of the world has there existed the same tendency to voluntary association, the distinguishing mark of freedom, as in India. In none have the smaller communities been to the same extent permitted the exercise of self-government. Each Hindoo village had its distinct organization, and under its simple and "almost patriarchal arrangements," says Mr. Greig,[62]—

"The natives of Hindoostan seem to have lived from the earliest, down, comparatively speaking, to late times—if not free from the troubles and annoyances to which men in all conditions of society are more or less subject, still in the full enjoyment, each individual, of his property, and of a very considerable share of personal liberty. * * * Leave him in possession of the farm which his forefathers owned, and preserve entire the institutions to which he had from infancy been accustomed, and the simple Hindoo would give himself no concern whatever as to the intrigues and cabals which took place at the capital. Dynasties might displace one another; revolutions might recur; and the persons of his sovereigns might change every day; but so long as his own little society remained undisturbed, all other contingencies were to him subjects scarcely of speculation. To this, indeed, more than to any other cause, is to be ascribed the facility with which one conqueror after another has overrun different parts of India; which submitted, not so much because its inhabitants were wanting in courage, as because to the great majority among them it signified nothing by whom the reins of the supreme government were held. A third consequence of the village system has been one which men will naturally regard as advantageous or the reverse, according to the opinions which they hold, touching certain abstract points into which it is not necessary to enter here. Perhaps there are not to be found on the face of the earth, a race of human beings whose attachment to their native place will bear a comparison with that of the Hindoos. There are no privations which the Hindoo will hesitate to bear, rather than voluntarily abandon the spot where he was born; and if continued oppression drive him forth, he will return to it again after long years of exile with fresh fondness."

The Mohammedan conquest left these simple and beautiful institutions untouched. "Each Hindoo village," says Col. Briggs, in his work on the land tax—

"Had its distinct municipality, and over a certain number of villages, or district, was an hereditary chief and accountant, both possessing great local influence and authority, and certain territorial domains or estates. The Mohammedans early saw the policy of not disturbing an institution so complete, and they availed themselves of the local influence of these officers to reconcile their subjects to their rule. * * * From the existence of these local Hindoo chiefs at the end of six centuries in all countries conquered by the Mohammedans, it is fair to conclude that they were cherished and maintained with great attention as the key-stone of their civil government. While the administration of the police, and the collection of the revenues, were left in the hands of these local chiefs, every part of the new territory was retained under military occupation by an officer of rank; and a considerable body of Mohammedan soldiers.* * * In examining the details of Mohammedan history, which has been minute in recording the rise and progress of all these kingdoms, we nowhere discover any attempt to alter the system originally adopted. The ministers, the nobles, and the military chiefs, all bear Mohammedan names and titles, but no account is given of the Hindoo institutions, being subverted, or Mohammedan officers, being employed in the minor, details, of the civil administration.

"It would appear from this that the Moslems, so far from imposing their own laws upon their subjects, treated the customs of the latter with the utmost respect; and that they did so because experience taught them that their own interests were advanced by a line of policy so prudent."

Local action and local combination are everywhere conspicuous in the history of this country. With numerous rulers, some of whom to a greater or less extent acknowledged the superiority of the Sovereign of Delhi, the taxes required for their support were heavy, but they were locally expended, and if the cultivator contributed too large a portion of his grain, it was at least consumed in a neighbouring market, and nothing went from off the land. Manufactures, too, were widely spread, and thus was made a demand for the labour not required in agriculture. "On the coast of Coromandel," says Orme,[63] "and in the province of Bengal, when at some distance from a high road or principal town, it is difficult to find a village in which every man, woman, and child is not employed in making a piece of cloth. At present," he continues, "much the greatest part of whole provinces are employed in this single manufacture." Its progress, as he says, "includes no less than a description of the lives of half the inhabitants of Indostan." While employment was thus locally subdivided, tending to enable neighbour to exchange with neighbour, the exchanges between the producers of food, or of salt, in one part of the country and the producers of cotton and manufacturers of cloth in another, tended to the production of commerce with more distant men, and this tendency was much increased by the subdivision of the cotton manufacture itself. Bengal was celebrated for the finest muslins, the consumption of which at Delhi, and in Northern India generally, was large, while the Coromandel coast was equally celebrated for the best chintzes and calicoes, leaving to Western India the manufacture of strong and inferior goods of every kind. Under these circumstances it is no matter of surprise that the country was rich, and that its people, although often overtaxed, and sometimes plundered by invading armies, were prosperous in a high degree.

Nearly a century has now elapsed since, by the battle of Plassey, British power was established in India, and from that day local action has tended to disappear, and centralization to take its place. From its date to the close of the century there was a rapidly increasing tendency toward having all the affairs of the princes and the people settled by the representatives of the Company established in Calcutta, and as usual in such cases, the country was filled with adventurers, very many of whom were wholly without principle, men whose sole object was that of the accumulation of fortune by any means, however foul, as is well known by all who are familiar with the indignant denunciations of Burke.[64]

England was thus enriched as India was impoverished, and as centralization was more and more established.

Step by step the power of the Company was extended, and everywhere was adopted the Hindoo principle that the sovereign was proprietor of the soil, and sole landlord, and as such the government claimed to be entitled to one-half of the gross produce of the land. "Wherever," says Mr. Rickards, long an eminent servant of the Company,

"The British power supplanted that of the Mohammedans in Bengal, we did not, it is true, adopt the sanguinary part of their creed; but from the impure fountain of their financial system, did we, to our shame, claim the inheritance to a right to seize upon half the gross produce of the land as a tax; and wherever our arms have triumphed, we have invariably proclaimed this savage right: coupling it at the same time with the senseless doctrine of the proprietary right to these lands being also vested in the sovereign, in virtue of the right of conquest."—Rickards's India, vol. i, 275.

Under the earlier Mohammedan sovereigns, this land-tax, now designated as rent, had been limited to a thirteenth, and from that to a sixth of the produce of the land; but in the reign of Akber (16th century) it was fixed at one-third, numerous other taxes being at the same time abolished. With the decline and gradual dissolution of the empire, the local sovereigns not only increased it, but revived the taxes that had been discontinued, and instituted others of a most oppressive kind; all of which were continued by the Company, while the land-tax was maintained at its largest amount. While thus imposing taxes at discretion, the Company had also a monopoly of trade, and it could dictate the prices of all it had to sell, as well as of all that it needed to buy; and here was a further and most oppressive tax, all of which was for the benefit of absentee landlords.

With the further extension of power, the demands on the Company's treasury increased without an increase of the power to meet them; for exhaustion is a natural consequence of absenteeism, or centralization, as has so well been proved in Ireland. The people became less able to pay the taxes, and as the government could not be carried on without revenue, a permanent settlement was made by Lord Cornwallis, by means of which all the rights of village proprietors, over a large portion of Bengal, were sacrificed in favour of the Zemindars, who were thus at once constituted great landed proprietors and absolute masters of a host of poor tenants, with power to punish at discretion those who were so unfortunate as not to be able to pay a rent the amount of which had no limit but that of the power to extort it. It was the middleman system of Ireland transplanted to India; but the results were at first unfavourable to the Zemindars, as the rents, for which they themselves were responsible to the government, were so enormous that all the rack-renting and all the flogging inflicted upon the poor cultivators could not enable them to pay; and but few years elapsed before the Zemindars themselves were sold out to make way for another set as keen and as hard-hearted as themselves. That system having failed to answer the purpose, it was next determined to arrest the extension of the permanent settlement, and to settle with each little ryot, or cultivator, to the entire exclusion of the village authorities, by whom, under the native governments, the taxes had uniformly been so equitably and satisfactorily distributed. The Ryotwar system was thus established, and how it has operated may be judged from the following sketch, presented by Mr. Fullerton, a member of the Council at Madras:—

"Imagine the revenue leviable through the agency of one hundred thousand revenue officers, collected or remitted at their discretion, according to the occupant's means of paying, whether from the produce of his land or his separate property; and in order to encourage every man to act as a spy on his neighbour, and report his means of paying, that he may eventually save himself from extra demand, imagine all the cultivators of a village liable at all times to a separate demand in order to make up for the failure of one or more individuals of the parish. Imagine collectors to every county, acting under the orders of a board, on the avowed principle of destroying all competition for labour by a general equalization of assessment, seizing and sending back runaways to each other. And, lastly, imagine the collector the sole magistrate or justice of the peace of the county, through the medium and instrumentality of whom alone any criminal complaint of personal grievance suffered by the subject can reach the superior courts. Imagine, at the same time, every subordinate officer employed in the collection of the land revenue to be a police officer, vested with the power to fine, confine, put in the stocks, and flog any inhabitant within his range, on any charge, without oath of the accuser, or sworn recorded evidence of the case."[65]

Any improvement in cultivation produced an immediate increase of taxation, so that any exertion on the part of the cultivator would benefit the Company, and not himself. One-half of the gross produce [66] may be assumed to have been the average annual rent, although, in many cases it greatly exceeded that proportion. The Madras Revenue Board, May 17th, 1817, stated that the "conversion of the government share of the produce (of lands) is in some districts, as high as 60 or 70 per cent. of the whole."[67]

It might be supposed that, having taken so large a share of the gross produce, the cultivator would be permitted to exist on the remainder, but such is not the case. Mr. Rickards gives [68] a list of sixty other taxes, invented by the sovereigns, or their agents, many of which he states to exist at the present day. Those who have any other mode of employing either capital or labour, in addition to the cultivation of their patches of land, as is very frequently the case, are subject to the following taxes, the principle of which is described as excellent by one of the collectors, December 1st, 1812:—

"The Veesabuddy, or tax on merchants, traders, and shopkeepers; Mohturfa, or tax on weavers, cotton cleaners, shepherds, goldsmiths, braziers, ironsmiths, carpenters, stone-cutters, &c.; and Bazeebab, consisting of smaller taxes annually rented out to the highest-bidder. The renter was thus constituted a petty chieftain, with power to exact fees at marriages, religious ceremonies; to inquire into and fine the misconduct of females in families, and other misdemeanours; and in the exercise of their privileges would often urge the plea of engagements to the Cirkar (government) to justify extortion. The details of these taxes are too long to be given in this place. The reader, however, may judge of the operation and character of all by the following selection of one, as described in the collector's report:—'The mode of settling the Mohturfa on looms hitherto has been very minute; every circumstance of the weaver's family is considered, the number of days which he devotes to his loom, the number of his children, the assistance which he receives from them, and the number and quality of the pieces which he can turn out in a month or year; so that, let him exert himself as he will, his industry will always be taxed to the highest degree.' This mode always leads to such details that the government servants cannot enter into it, and the assessment of the tax is, in consequence, left a great deal too much to the Curnums of the villages. No weaver can possibly know what he is to pay to the Cirkar, till the demand come to be made for his having exerted himself through the year; and having turned out one or two pieces of cloth more than he did the year before, though his family and looms have been the same, is made the ground for his being charged a higher Mohturfa, and at last, instead of a professional, it becomes a real income tax."[69]

The following will show that no mode of employing capital is allowed to escape the notice of the tax-gatherer:—

"The reader will, perhaps, better judge of the inquisitorial nature of one of these surveys, or pymashees, as they are termed in Malabar, by knowing that upward of seventy different kinds of buildings—the houses, shops, or warehouses of different castes and professions—were ordered to be entered in the survey accounts; besides the following 'implements of professions' which were usually assessed to the public revenue, viz.:

"Oil-mills, iron manufactory, toddy-drawer's stills, potter's kiln, washerman's stone, goldsmith's tools, sawyer's saw, toddy-drawer's knives, fishing-nets, barber's hones, blacksmith's anvils, pack bullocks, cocoa-nut safe, small fishing-boats, cotton-beater's bow, carpenter's tools, large fishing-boats, looms, salt storehouse."[70]

"If the landlord objected to the assessment on trees as old and past bearing, they were, one and all, ordered to be cut down, nothing being allowed to stand that did not pay revenue to the state. To judge of this order, it should be mentioned that the trees are valuable, and commonly used for building, in Malabar. To fell all the timber on a man's estate when no demand existed for it in the market, and merely because its stream of revenue had been drained, is an odd way of conferring benefits and protecting property."[71]

"Having myself," says Mr. Rickards, "been principal collector of Malabar, and made, during my residence in the province, minute inquiries into the produce and assessments of lands, I was enabled to ascertain beyond all doubt, and to satisfy the revenue board at Madras, that in the former survey of the province, which led to the rebellion, lands and produce were inserted in the pretended survey account which absolutely did not exist, while other lands were assessed to the revenue at more than their actual produce."[72]

"Fifty per cent. on the assessment is allowed," says Mr. Campbell,[73] "as a reward to any informer of concealed cultivation, &c.; and it is stated that there are, 'in almost every village, dismissed accountants desirous of being re-employed, and unemployed servants who wish to bring themselves to notice,' whose services as informers can be relied on."

A system like this, involving the most prying supervision of the affairs of each individual, and in which, in settling the tax to be paid, "the collector takes into consideration the number of children [74] to be supported, makes the poor ryot a mere slave to the collector, and with the disadvantage that the latter has no pecuniary interest in the preservation of his life, whereas the death of a slave, who constitutes a part of the capital of his owner, is a severe loss."

The tendency thus far has been, as we see, to sweep away the rights not only of kings and princes, but of all the native authorities, and to centralize in the hands of foreigners in Calcutta the power to determine for the cultivator, the artisan, or the labourer, what work he should do, and how much of its products he might retain, thus placing the latter in precisely the position of a mere slave to people who could feel no interest in him but simply as a tax-payer, and, who were represented by strangers in the country, whose authority was everywhere used by the native officers in their employ, to enable them to accumulate fortunes for themselves.

The poor manufacturer, as heavily taxed as the cultivator of the earth, found himself compelled to obtain advances from his employers, who, in their turn, claimed, as interest, a large proportion of the little profit that was made. The Company's agents, like the native merchants, advanced the funds necessary to produce the goods required for Europe, and the poor workmen are described as having been "in a state of dependence almost amounting to servitude, enabling the resident to obtain his labour at his own price."[75]

In addition to the taxes already described, a further one was collected at local custom-houses, on all exchanges between the several parts of the country; and to these were again added others imposed by means of monopolies of tobacco and opium, and of salt, one of the most important necessaries of life. The manufacture of coarse salt from the earth was strictly prohibited.[76] The salt lakes of the upper country furnish a supply so great that it is of little value on the spot;[77] but these lakes being even yet in the possession of native princes, the monopoly could then, and can now, be maintained only by aid of strong bands of revenue officers, whose presence renders that which is almost worthless on one side of an imaginary line so valuable on the other side of it that it requires the produce of the sixth part of the labour of the year to enable the poor Hindoo to purchase salt for his family. Along the seashore salt is abundantly furnished by nature, the solar heat causing a constant deposition of it; but the mere fact of collecting it was constituted an offence punishable by fine and imprisonment, and the quantity collected by the Company's officers was limited to that required for meeting the demand at a monopoly price, all the remainder being regularly destroyed, lest the poor ryot should succeed in obtaining for himself, at cost, such a supply as was needed to render palatable the rice which constituted almost his only food. The system has since been rendered less oppressive, but even now the duty is ten times greater than it was under enlightened Mohammedan sovereigns.[78]

Such being the mode of collecting the revenue, we may now look to its distribution. Under the native princes it was, to a great extent, locally-expended, whereas, under the new system, all the collections by government or by individuals tended to Calcutta, to be there disposed of. Thence no inconsiderable portion of it passed to England, and thus was established a perpetual drain that certainly could not be estimated at less than four millions of pounds sterling per annum, and cannot be placed, in the last century, at less than four hundred millions of pounds, or two thousand millions of dollars.

The difference between an absentee landlord expending at a distance all his rents, and a resident one distributing it again among his tenants in exchange for services, and the difference in the value of the products of the land resulting from proximity to market, are so well exhibited in the following passage from a recent work on India, that the reader cannot fail to profit by its perusal:—

"The great part of the wheat, grain, and other exportable land produce which the people consume, as far as we have yet come, is drawn from our Nerbudda districts, and those of Malwa which border upon them; and par consequent, the price has been rapidly increasing as we recede from them in our advance northward. Were the soil of those Nerbudda districts, situated as they are at such a distance from any great market for their agricultural products, as bad as it is in the parts of Bundelcund that I came over, no net surplus revenue could possibly be drawn from them in the present state of arts and industry. The high prices paid here for land produce, arising from the necessity of drawing a great part of what is consumed from such distant lands, enables the Rajahs of these Bundelcund states to draw the large revenue they do. These chiefs expend the whole of their revenue in the maintenance of public establishments of one kind or other; and as the essential articles of subsistence, wheat and grain, &c., which are produced in their own districts, or those immediately around them, are not sufficient for the supply of these establishments, they must draw them from distant territories. All this produce is brought on the backs of bullocks, because there is no road from the districts whence they obtain it, over which a wheeled carriage can be drawn with safety; and as this mode of transit is very expensive, the price of the produce, when it reaches the capitals, around which these local establishments are concentrated, becomes very high. They must pay a price equal to the collective cost of purchasing and bringing this substance from the most distant districts, to which they are at any time obliged to have recourse for a supply, or they will not be supplied; and as there cannot be two prices for the same thing in the same market, the wheat and grain produced in the neighbourhood of one of these Bundelcund capitals, fetch as high a price there as that brought from the most remote districts on the banks of the Nerbudda river; while it costs comparatively nothing to bring it from the former lands to the markets. Such lands, in consequence, yield a rate of rent much greater compared with their natural powers of fertility than those of the remotest districts whence produce is drawn for these markets or capitals; and as all the lands are the property of the Rajahs, they draw all these rents as revenue.

"Were we to take this revenue, which the Rajahs now enjoy, in tribute for the maintenance of public establishments concentrated at distant seats, all these local establishments would of course be at once disbanded; and all the effectual demand which they afford for the raw agricultural produce of distant districts would cease. The price of the produce would diminish in proportion; and with it the value of the lands of the districts around such capitals. Hence the folly of conquerors and paramount powers, from the days of the Greeks and Romans down to those of Lord Hastings and Sir John Malcolm, who were all bad political economists, supposing that conquered and ceded territories could always be made to yield to a foreign state the same amount of gross revenue they had paid to their domestic government, whatever their situation with reference to the markets for their produce—whatever the state of their arts and their industry—and whatever the character and extent of the local establishments maintained out of it. The settlements of the land revenue in all the territories acquired in central India during the Mahratta war, which ended, in 1817, were made upon the supposition, that the lands would continue to pay the same rate of rent under the new, as they had paid under the old government, uninfluenced by the diminution of all local establishments, civil and military, to one-tenth of what they had been; that, under the new order of things, all the waste lands must be brought into tillage; and be able to pay as high a rate of rent as before tillage; and, consequently, that the aggregate available net revenue must greatly and rapidly increase! Those who had the making of the settlements, and the governing of these new territories, did not consider that the diminution of every establishment was the removal of a market—of an effectual demand for land produce; and that when all the waste lands should be brought into tillage, the whole would deteriorate in fertility, from the want of fallows, under the prevailing system of agriculture, which afforded the lands no other means of renovation from over cropping. The settlements of the land revenue which were made throughout our new acquisitions upon these fallacious assumptions, of course failed. During a series of quinquennial settlements, the assessment has been everywhere gradually reduced to about two-thirds of what it was when our rule began; and to less than one-half of what Sir John Malcolm, and all the other local authorities, and even the worthy Marquis of Hastings himself, under the influence of their opinions, expected it would be. The land revenues of the native princes of central India, who reduced their public establishments, which the new order of things seemed to render useless, and thereby diminished their only markets for the raw produce of their lands, have been everywhere falling off in the same proportion; and scarcely one of them now draws two-thirds of the income he drew from the same lands in 1817.

"There are in the valley of the Nerbudda, districts that yield a great deal more produce every year than either Orcha, Jansee, or Duteea; and yet, from the want of the same domestic markets, they do not yield one-fourth of the amount of land revenue. The lands are, however, rated equally high to the assessment, in proportion to their value to the farmers and cultivators. To enable them to yield a larger revenue to government, they require to have larger establishments as markets for land produce. These establishments may be either public, and paid by government, or they may be private, as manufactories, by which the land produce of these districts would be consumed by people employed in investing the value of their labour in commodities suited to the demand of distant markets, and more valuable than land produce in proportion to their weight and bulk. These are the establishments which government should exert itself to introduce and foster, since the valley of the Nerbudda, in addition to a soil exceedingly fertile, has in its whole line, from its source to its embouchure, rich beds of coal reposing for the use of future generations, under the sandstone of the Sathpore and Vindhya ranges; and beds no less rich of very fine iron. These advantages have not yet been justly appreciated; but they will be so by and by."[79]

From the concluding lines of this extract the reader will see that India is abundantly supplied with fuel and iron ore, and that if she has not good machinery, the deficiency is not chargeable to nature. At the close of the last century cotton abounded, and to so great an extent was the labour of men, women, and children applied to its conversion into cloth, that, even with their imperfect machinery, they not only supplied the home demand for the beautiful tissues of Dacca and the coarse products of Western India, but they exported to other parts of the world no less than 200,000,000 of pieces per annum.[80] Exchanges with every part of the world were so greatly in their favour that a rupee which would now sell for but 1s. 10d. or 44 cents, was then worth 2s. 8d. or 64 cents. The Company had a monopoly of collecting taxes in India, but in return it preserved to the people the control of their domestic market, by aid of which they were enabled to convert their rice, their salt, and their cotton, into cloth that could be cheaply carried to the most remote parts of the world. Such protection was needed, because while England prohibited the export of even a single collier who might instruct the people of India in the mode of mining coal—of a steam engine to pump water or raise coal, or a mechanic who could make one—of a worker in iron who might smelt the ore—of a spinning-jenny or power-loom, or of an artisan who could give instruction in the use of such machines—and thus systematically prevented them from keeping pace with improvement in the rest of the world,—she at the same time imposed very heavy duties on the produce of Indian looms received in England. The day was at hand, however, when that protection was to disappear. The Company did not, it was said, export sufficiently largely of the produce of British industry, and in 1813 the trade to India was thrown open—but the restriction on the export of machinery and artisans was maintained in full force; and thus were the poor and ignorant people of that country exposed to "unlimited competition," with a people possessed of machinery ten times more effective than their own, while not only by law deprived of the power to purchase machinery, but also of the power of competing in the British market with the produce of British looms. Further than this, every loom in India, and every machine calculated to aid the labourer, was subject to a tax that increased with every increase in the industry of its owner, and in many cases absorbed the whole profit derived from its use.[81] Such were the circumstances under which the poor Hindoo was called upon to encounter, unprotected, the "unlimited competition" of foreigners in his own market. It was freedom of trade all on one side. Four years after, the export of cottons from Bengal still amounted to 1,659,994,[82] but ten years later it had declined to 285,121; and at the end of twenty years we find a whole year pass by without the export of a single piece of cotton cloth from Calcutta, the whole of the immense trade that existed but half a century since having disappeared. What were the measures used for the accomplishment of the work of destroying a manufacture that gave employment and food to so many millions of the poor people of the country, will be seen on a perusal of the following memorial, which shows that while India was denied machinery, and also denied access to the British market, she was forced to receive British cottons free of all duty:—

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

"Calcutta, 1st Sept. 1831.

"To the Right Honourable the Lords of His Majesty's Privy Council for Trade, &c.

"The humble Petition of the undersigned Manufacturers and Dealers in Cotton and Silk Piece Goods, the fabrics of Bengal;

"SHOWETH—That of late years your Petitioners have found their business nearly superseded by the introduction of the fabrics of Great Britain into Bengal, the importation of which augments every year, to the great prejudice of the native manufacturers.

"That the fabrics of Great Britain are consumed in Bengal, without any duties being levied thereon to protect the native fabrics.

"That the fabrics of Bengal are charged with the following duties when they are used in Great Britain—

"On manufactured cottons, 10 per cent. On manufactured silks, 24 per cent.

"Your Petitioners most humbly implore your Lordships' consideration of these circumstances, and they feel confident that no disposition exists in England to shut the door against the industry of any part of the inhabitants of this great empire.

"They therefore pray to be admitted to the privilege of British subjects, and humbly entreat your Lordships to allow the cotton and silk fabrics of Bengal to be used in Great Britain 'free of duty,' or at the same rate which may be charged on British fabrics consumed in Bengal.

"Your Lordships must be aware of the immense advantages the British manufacturers derive from their skill in constructing and using machinery, which enables them to undersell the unscientific manufacturers of Bengal in their own country: and, although your Petitioners are not sanguine in expecting to derive any great advantage from having their prayer granted, their minds would feel gratified by such a manifestation of your Lordships' good-will toward them; and such an instance of justice to the natives of India would not fail to endear the British government to them.

"They therefore confidently trust that your Lordships' righteous consideration will be extended to them as British subjects, without exception of sect, country, or colour.

"And your Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray." [Signed by 117 natives of high respectability.]

The object sought to be accomplished would not have, however, been attained by granting the prayer of this most reasonable and humble petition. When the export of cotton, woollen, and steam machinery was prohibited, it was done with a view of compelling all the wool of the world to come to England to be spun and woven, thence to be returned to be worn by those who raised it—thus depriving the people of the world of all power to apply their labour otherwise than in taking from the earth cotton, sugar, indigo, and other commodities for the supply of the great "workshop of the world." How effectually that object has been accomplished in India, will be seen from the following facts. From the date of the opening of the trade in 1813, the domestic manufacture and the export of cloth have gradually declined until the latter has finally ceased, and the export of raw cotton to England has gradually risen until it has attained a height of about sixty millions of pounds,[83] while the import of twist from England has risen to twenty-five millions of pounds, and of cloth, to two hundred and sixty millions of yards; weighing probably fifty millions of pounds, which, added to the twist, make seventy-five millions, requiring for their production somewhat more than eighty millions of raw cotton. We see thus that every pound of the raw material sent to England is returned. The cultivator receives for it one penny, and when it returns to him in the form of cloth, he pays for it from one to two shillings, the whole difference being absorbed in the payment of the numerous brokers, transporters, manufacturers, and operatives, men, women, and children, that have thus been interposed between the producer and the consumer. The necessary consequence of this has been that everywhere manufactures have disappeared. Dacca, one of the principal seats of the cotton manufacture, contained 90,000 houses, but its trade had already greatly fallen off even at the date of the memorial above given, and its splendid buildings, factories, and churches are now a mass of ruins and overgrown with jungle. The cotton of the district found itself compelled to go to England that it might there be twisted and sent back again, thus performing a voyage of 20,000 miles in search of the little spindle, because it was a part of the British policy not to permit the spindle anywhere to take its place by the side of the cultivator of cotton.

The change thus effected has been stated in a recent official report to have been attended with ruin and distress, to which "no parallel can be found in the annals of commerce." What were the means by which it was effected is shown in the fact that at this period Sir Robert Peel stated that in Lancashire, children were employed fifteen and seventeen hours per day during the week, and on Sunday morning, from six until twelve, cleaning the machinery. In Coventry, ninety-six hours in the week was the time usually required; and of those employed, many obtained but 2s. 9d.—66 cents—for a week's wages. The object to be accomplished was that of underworking the poor Hindoo, and driving him from the market of the world, after which he was to be driven from his own. The mode of accomplishment was that of cheapening labour and enslaving the labourer at home and abroad.

With the decline of manufactures there has ceased to be a demand for the services of women or children in the work of conversion, and they are forced either to remain idle, or to seek employment in the field; and here we have one of the distinguishing marks of a state of slavery. The men, too, who were accustomed to fill up the intervals of other employments in pursuits connected with the cotton manufacture, were also driven to the field—and all demand for labour, physical or intellectual, was at an end, except so far as was needed for raising rice, indigo, sugar, or cotton. The rice itself they were not permitted to clean, being debarred therefrom by a duty double that which was paid on paddy, or rough rice, on its import into England. The poor grower of cotton, after paying to the government seventy-eight per cent.[84] of the product of his labour, found himself deprived of the power to trade directly with the man of the loom, and forced into "unlimited competition" with the better machinery and almost untaxed labour of our Southern States; and thereby subjected to "the mysterious variations of foreign markets" in which the fever of speculation was followed by the chill of revulsion with a rapidity and frequency that set at naught all calculation. If our crops were small, his English customers would take his cotton; but when he sent over more next year, there had, perhaps, been a good season here, and the Indian article became an absolute drug in the market. It was stated some time since, in the House of Commons, that one gentleman, Mr. Turner, had thrown 7000 worth of Indian cotton upon a dunghill, because he could find no market for it.

It will now readily be seen that the direct effect of thus compelling the export of cotton from India was to increase the quantity pressing on the market of England, and thus to lower the price of all the cotton of the world, including that required for domestic consumption. The price of the whole Indian crop being thus rendered dependent on that which could be realized for a small surplus that would have no existence but for the fact that the domestic manufacture had been destroyed, it will readily be seen how enormous has been the extent of injury inflicted upon the poor cultivator by the forcible separation of the plough and the loom, and the destruction of the power of association. Again, while the price of cotton is fixed in England, there, too, is fixed the price of cloth, and such is the case with the sugar and the indigo to the production of which these poor people are forced to devote themselves; and thus are they rendered the mere slaves of distant men, who determine what they shall receive for all they have to sell, and what they shall pay for all they require to purchase. Centralization and slavery go thus always hand in hand with each other.

The ryots are, as we see, obliged to pay sixteen or eighteen pence for the pound of cotton that has yielded them but one penny; and all this difference is paid for the labour of other people while idle themselves.

"A great part of the time of the labouring population in India is," says Mr. Chapman,[85] "spent in idleness. I don't say this to blame them in the smallest degree. Without the means of exporting heavy and crude surplus agricultural produce, and with scanty means, whether of capital, science, or manual skill, for elaborating on the spot articles fitted to induce a higher state of enjoyment and of industry in the mass of the people, they have really no inducement to exertion beyond that which is necessary to gratify their present and very limited wishes; those wishes are unnaturally low, inasmuch as they do not afford the needful stimulus to the exercise requisite to intellectual and moral improvement; and it is obvious that there is no remedy for this but extended intercourse. Meanwhile, probably the half of the human time and energy of India runs to mere waste. Surely we need not wonder at the poverty of the country."

Assuredly we need not. They are idle perforce. With indifferent means of communication, their cotton and their food could readily travel in the form of cloth, and they could consume liberally of food and clothing; but they find themselves now forced to export every thing in its rudest form, and this they are to do in a country that is almost without roads. The manner in which these raw products now travel may be seen on a perusal of the following passage from the London Economist:—

"The cotton is brought on oxen, carrying 160 pounds each, at the extreme rate, in fair weather, of seven miles a day for a continuance, and at a price of about 5s. for each hundred miles. If we take the average distance to Mirzapore at 500 miles, each pound of cotton costs in transit alone above 2-1/2 d. It has thence to be borne by water-carriage nearly 800 miles farther on to Calcutta. * * * The great cotton-growing districts are in the northern portion of the Peninsula, embracing Guzerat, and a vast tract called the Deccan, lying between the Satpoora range of hills and the course of the Kishna River. General Briggs says—'The cotton from the interior of the country to the coast at Bombay occupies a continuous journey of from one to two months, according to the season of the year; while in the rains the route is wholly impassable, and the traffic of the country is at a stand.'

"In the absence of a defined road, even the carriers, with their pack-cattle, are compelled to travel by daylight, to prevent the loss of their bullocks in the jungles they have to pass through, and this under a burning sun of from 100 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The droves of oxen are never so few as one hundred, and sometimes exceed a thousand. Every morning after daylight each animal has to be saddled, and the load lifted on him by two men, one on each side; and before they are all ready to move the sun has attained a height which renders the heat to an European oppressive. The whole now proceeds at the rate of about two miles an hour, and seldom performs a journey of more than eight miles; but, as the horde rests every fourth day, the average distance is but six miles a day. If the horde is overtaken by rain, the cotton, saturated by moisture, becomes heavy, and the black clayey soil, through which the whole line of road lies, sinks under the feet of a man above the ankle, and under that of a laden ox to the knees.

"In this predicament the cargo of cotton lies sometimes for weeks on the ground, and the merchant is ruined."

"So miserably bad," says another writer, "are the existing means of communication with the interior, that many of the most valuable articles of produce are, for want of carriage and a market, often allowed to perish on the farm, while the cost of that which found its way to the port was enormously enhanced; but the quantity did not amount to above 20 per cent. of the whole of the produce, the remainder of the articles always being greatly deteriorated."

It will scarcely be difficult now to understand why it is that cotton yields the cultivator but a penny per pound. Neither will it be difficult, seeing that the local manufacturers have every where been ruined, to understand why the producer of the more bulky food is in a condition that is even worse, now that the consumer has disappeared from his side. If the crop is large, grain is a drug for which scarcely any price can be obtained;[86] and if it is small, the people perish, by thousands and ten of thousands, of famine, because, in the existing state of the roads, there can be little or no exchange of raw products. In the first case the cultivator is ruined, because it requires almost the whole crop to pay the taxes. In the other he is starved; and all this is a necessary consequence of a system that excludes the great middle class of mechanics and other working-men, and resolves a great nation into a mass of wretched cultivators, slaves to a few grasping money lenders. Under such circumstances, the accumulation of any thing like capital is impossible. "None," says Colonel Sleeman,[87] "have stock equal to half their rent." They are dependent everywhere, on the produce of the year, and however small may be its amount, the taxes must be paid, and of all that thus goes abroad nothing is returned. The soil gets nothing.[88] It is not manured, nor can it be under a system of absenteeism like this, and its fertility everywhere declines, as is shown by the following extracts:—

"Formerly, the governments kept no faith with their land-holders and cultivators, exacting ten rupees where they had bargained for five, whenever they found the crops good; but, in spite of all this zolm, (oppression,) there was then more burkut (blessings from above) than now. The lands yielded more returns to the cultivator, and he could maintain his little family better upon five acres than he can now upon ten.[89]

"The land requires rest from labour, as well as men and bullocks; and if you go on sowing wheat and other exhausting crops, it will go on yielding less and less returns, and at last will not be worth the tilling."[90]

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

The soil is being exhausted, and every thing necessarily goes backward. Trees are cut down, but none are planted; and the former sites of vast groves are becoming arid wastes, a consequence of which is, that droughts become from year to year more frequent.

"The clouds," says Colonel Sleeman,[92] "brought up from the southern ocean by the south-east trade-wind are attracted, as they pass over the island, by the forests in the interior, and made to drop their stores in daily refreshing showers. In many other parts of the world, governments have now become aware of this mysterious provision of nature, and have adopted measures to take advantage of it for the benefit of the people; and the dreadful sufferings to which the people of those of our districts, which have been the most denuded of their trees, have been of late years exposed from the want of rain in due season, may, perhaps, induce our Indian government, to turn its thoughts to the subject."

In former times extensive works were constructed for irrigating the land, but they are everywhere going to ruin—thus proving that agriculture cannot flourish in the absence of the mechanic arts:

"In Candeish, very many bunds [river-banks formed for purposes of irrigation] which were kept in repair under former governments, have, under ours, fallen to decay; nevertheless, not only has the population increased considerably under our rule, but in 1846 or 1847, the collector was obliged to grant remission of land tax, 'because the abundance of former years lay stagnating in the province, and the low prices of grain from that cause prevented the ryots from being able to pay their fixed land assessment.'"[93]

We have here land abandoned and the cultivator ruined for want of a market for food, and wages falling for want of a market for labour; and yet these poor people are paying for English food and English labour employed in converting into cloth the cotton produced alongside of the food—and they are ruined because they have so many middlemen to pay that the producer of cotton can obtain little food, and the producer of food can scarcely pay his taxes, and has nothing to give for cloth. Every thing tends, therefore, toward barbarism, and, as in the olden time of England and of Europe generally, famines become steadily more numerous and more severe, as is here shown:—

"Some of the finest tracts of land have been forsaken, and given up to the untamed beasts of the jungle. The motives to industry have been destroyed. The soil seems to lie under a curse. Instead of yielding abundance for the wants of its own population, and the inhabitants of other regions, it does not keep in existence its own children. It becomes the burying-place of millions, who die upon its bosom crying for bread. In proof of this, turn your eyes backward upon the scenes of the past year. Go with me into the north-western provinces of the Bengal presidency, and I will show you the bleaching skeletons of five hundred thousand human beings, who perished of hunger in the space of a few short months. Yes, died of hunger in what has been justly called the granary of the world. Bear with me, if I speak of the scenes which were exhibited during the prevalence of this famine. The air for miles was poisoned by the effluvia emitted from the putrefying bodies of the dead. The rivers were choked with the corpses thrown into their channels. Mothers cast their little ones beneath the rolling waves, because they would not see them draw their last gasp and feel them stiffen in their arms. The English in the city were prevented from taking their customary evening drives. Jackalls and vultures approached, and fastened upon the bodies of men, women, and children, before life was extinct. Madness, disease, despair stalked abroad, and no human power present to arrest their progress. It was the carnival of death! And this occurred in British India—in the reign of Victoria the First! Nor was the event extraordinary and unforeseen. Far from it: 1835-36 witnessed a famine in the northern provinces: 1833 beheld one to the eastward: 1822-23 saw one in the Deccan. They have continued to increase in frequency and extent under our sway for more than half a century."[94]

The famine of 1838 is thus described by Mr. George Thompson, late M. P., on the testimony of a gentleman of high respectability:

"The poorer houses were entirely unroofed, the thatches having been given to feed the cattle, which had nevertheless died; so that cattle had disappeared altogether from the land. He says that a few attenuated beings, more like skeletons than human creatures, were seen hovering about among the graves of those who had been snatched away by the famine; that desertion was everywhere visible, and that the silence of death reigned. In one of the villages, he says, an old man from whom they had bought a goat during their former visit, in 1833, was the only survivor of the whole community except his brother's son, whom he was cherishing and endeavouring to keep alive, and these two had subsisted altogether upon the eleemosynary bounty of travellers. The courier of Lord Auckland had informed this gentleman that when the governor-general passed through that part of the country the roads were lined on either side with heaps of dead bodies, and that they had not unfrequently to remove those masses of unburied human beings, ere the governor-general could proceed onward with his suite; and that every day from 2000 to 3000 famishing wretches surrounded and followed the carriages, to whom he dealt out a scanty meal; and on one occasion the horse of the courier took fright, and on the cause being ascertained—what was it? It was found to be the lifeless body of a man who had died with his hand in his mouth, from which he had already devoured the fingers."[95]

The more severe the pressure on the poor ryot, the greater is the power of the few who are always ready to profit by the losses of their neighbours. These poor people are obliged to borrow money on their growing crops, the prices of which are regulated by the will of the lender rather than by the standard of the market, and the rate of interest which the cultivators pay for these loans is often not less than 40 or 50 per cent.

A recent traveller says of the unfortunate cultivator—

"Always oppressed, ever in poverty, the ryot is compelled to seek the aid of the mahajun, or native money-lender. This will frequently be the talukdhar, or sub-renter, who exacts from the needy borrower whatever interest he thinks the unfortunate may he able to pay him, often at the rate of one per cent. per week. The accounts of these loans are kept by the mahajuns, who, aware of the deep ignorance of their clients, falsify their books, without fear of detection. In this way, no matter how favourable the season, how large the crop, the grasping mahajun is sure to make it appear that the whole is due to him; for he takes it at his own value. So far from Mr. Burke having overstated the case of the oppression of the ryots, on the trial of Warren Hastings, when he said that the tax-gatherer took from them eighteen shillings in every pound, he was really within the mark. At the conclusion of each crop-time, the grower of rice or cotton is made to appear a debtor to his superior, who thereupon provided the ryot appears able to toil on for another season—advances more seed for sowing, and a little more rice to keep the labourer and his family from absolute starvation. But should there be any doubt as to the health and strength of the tenant-labourer, he is mercilessly turned from his land and his mud hut, and left to die on the highway."

This is slavery, and under such a system how could the wretched people be other than slaves? The men have no market for their labour, and the women and children must remain idle or work in the field, as did, and do, the women of Jamaica; and all because they are compelled everywhere to exhaust the soil in raising crops to be sent to a distance to be consumed, and finally to abandon the land, even where they do not perish of famine. Mr. Chapman informs us that—

"Even in the valley of the Ganges, where the population is in some districts from 600 to 800 to the square mile, one-third of the cultivable lands are not cultivated; and in the Deecan, from which we must chiefly look for increased supplies of cotton, the population, amounting to about 100 to the square mile, is maintained by light crops, grown on little more than half the cultivable land."[96]

Elsewhere he tells us that of the cultivable surface of all India one-half is waste.[97] Bishop Heber informs us of the "impenetrable jungle" that now surrounds the once great manufacturing city of Dacca; and the Bombay Times reminds its English readers of the hundreds of thousands of acres of rich land that are lying waste, and that might be made to produce cotton.