When population and wealth diminish it is always the rich soils that are first abandoned, as is shown in the Campagna of Rome, in the valley of Mexico, and in the deltas of the Ganges and the Nile. Without association they could never have been brought into cultivation, and with the disappearance of the power to associate they are of necessity allowed to relapse into their original condition. Driven back to the poor soils and forced to send abroad the product, their wretched cultivator becomes poorer from day to day, and the less he obtains the more he becomes a slave to the caprices of his landlord, and the more is he thrown upon the mercy of the money-lender, who lends on good security at three per cent. per month, but from him must have fifty or a hundred per cent. for a loan until harvest. That under such circumstances the wages of labour should be very low, even where the wretched people are employed, must be a matter of course. In some places the labourer has two and in others three rupees, or less than a dollar and a half, per month. The officers employed on the great zemindary estates have from three to four rupees, and that this is a high salary, is proved by the fact that the police receive but 48 rupees ($23) per annum, out of which they feed and clothe themselves! Such are the rewards of labour in a country possessing every conceivable means of amassing wealth, and they become less from year to year. "It could not be too universally known," said Mr. Bright in the House of Commons, two years since,

"That the cultivators of the soil were in a very unsatisfactory condition; that they were, in truth, in a condition of extreme and almost universal poverty. All testimony concurred upon that point. He would call the attention of the house to the statement of a celebrated native of India, the Rajah Rammohun Roy, who about twenty years ago published a pamphlet in London, in which he pointed out the ruinous effects of the zemindary system, and the oppression experienced by the ryots in the presidencies both of Bombay and Madras. After describing the state of matters generally, he added, 'Such was the melancholy condition of the agricultural labourers, that it always gave him the greatest pain to allude to it.' Three years afterward, Mr. Shore, who was a judge in India, published a work which was considered as a standard work till now, and he stated that 'the British Government was not regarded in a favourable light by the native population of India,'—that a system of taxation and extortion was carried on 'unparalleled in the annals of any country. Then they had the authority of an American planter, Mr. Finnie, who was in India in 1840, and who spoke of the deplorable condition of the cultivators of the soil, and stated that if the Americans were similarly treated, they would become as little progressive as the native Indians. He might next quote the accounts given by Mr. Marriott in 1838, a gentleman who was for thirty years engaged in the collection of the revenue in India, and who stated that 'the condition of the cultivators was greatly depressed, and that he believed it was still declining.' There was the evidence of a native of India to which he might refer on this subject. It was that of a gentleman, a native of Delhi, who was in England in the year 1849, and he could appeal to the right hon. baronet the member for Tamworth in favour of the credibility of that gentleman. He never met with a man of a more dignified character, or one apparently of greater intelligence, and there were few who spoke the English language with greater purity and perfection. That gentleman had written a pamphlet, in which he stated that throughout his whole line of march from Bombay he found the Nizam's territories better cultivated, and the ryots in a better state of circumstances, than were the Company's territories, of the people residing within them, who were plunged in a state of the greatest poverty; and he concluded his short, but comparatively full, notice of the present deplorable state of India, by observing that he feared this was but the prelude of many more such descriptions of the different portions of the Company's dominions which would be put forth before the subject would attract the notice of those whose duty it was to remove the evils that existed."

We have here confirmation of the correctness of the views of Colonel Sleeman, that the condition of the people under the local governments is better than under the great central government. Heavily as they are taxed, a small part only of the proceeds of taxes goes, in these cases, to Calcutta on its way to England, whereas, of the enormous salaries paid to English governors and judges, nearly the whole must go abroad, as no one consents to serve for a few years in India, except on such terms as will enable him to accumulate a fortune and return home to spend it. In further confirmation of this we have the facts so fully given in Mr. Campbell's recent work, (Modern India, chap, xi.,) and proving that security of person and property increases as we pass from the old possessions of the Company, and toward the newly acquired ones. Crime of every kind, gang robbery, perjury, and forgery, abound in Bengal and Madras, and the poverty of the cultivator is so great that the revenue is there the least, and is collected with the greatest difficulty—and there, too, it is that the power of association has been most effectually destroyed. Passing thence to the Northwestern provinces more recently acquired, person and property become more secure and the revenue increases; but when we reach the Punjab, which until now has been subject to the rule of Runjeet Singh and his successors, we find that, tyrants as he and they have been represented, the people have there been left in the exercise of self-government. The village communities and the beautiful system of association, destroyed in Bengal, there remain untouched. Officers of all kinds are there more responsible for the performance of their duties than are their fellows in the older provinces, and property and person are more secure than elsewhere in India. Gang robbery is rare, perjury is unfrequent, and Mr. Campbell informs us that a solemn oath is "astonishingly binding." "The longer we possess a province," he continues, "the more common and general does perjury become;" and we need no better evidence than is thus furnished of the slavish tendency of the system. The hill tribes, on the contrary, are remarkable for their "strict veracity," and Colonel Sleeman expresses the belief that "there is as little falsehood spoken in the village communities," as in any part of the world with an equal area and population.[98] In the new provinces the people read and write with facility, and they are men of physical and moral energy, good cultivators, and understand well both their rights and their duties; whereas from the older ones education has disappeared, and with it all power to associate together for any good purpose. In the new provinces, commerce is large, as is shown by the following facts representing the population and post-office revenue of Bengal, the N. W. Provinces, and the Punjab, placed in the order of their acquisition by the Company:—

Population. Post-office Revenue. —————- —————————— Bengal................ 41,000,000 480,500 rupees. N. W. Provinces....... 24,000,000 978,000 " Punjab................ 8,000,000 178,000 "

We have here exhibited the remarkable fact that in the country of the Sikhs, so long represented as a scene of grasping tyranny, eight millions of people pay as much postage as is paid by fifteen millions in Bengal, although in the latter is Calcutta, the seat of all the operations of a great centralized government. That such should be the case is not extraordinary, for the power advantageously to employ labour diminishes with the approach to the centre of British power, and increases as we recede from it. Idleness and drunkenness go hand in hand with each other, and therefore it is that Mr. Campbell finds himself obliged to state that "intemperance increases where our rule and system have been long established."[99] We see thus that the observations of both Mr. Campbell and Colonel Sleeman, authors of the most recent works on India, confirm to the letter the earlier statements of Captain Westmacott, an extract from which is here given:—

"It is greatly to be deplored, that in places the longest under our rule, there is the largest amount of depravity and crime. My travels in India have fallen little short of 8000 miles, and extended to nearly all the cities of importance in Northern, Western, and Central India. I have no hesitation in affirming, that in the Hindoo and Mussulman cities, removed from European intercourse, there is much less depravity than either in Calcutta, Madras, or Bombay, where Europeans chiefly congregate."

Calcutta grows, the city of palaces, but poverty and wretchedness grow as the people of India find themselves more and more compelled to resort to that city to make their exchanges. Under the native rule, the people of each little district could exchange with each other food for cotton or cotton cloth, paying nobody for the privilege. Now, every man must send his cotton to Calcutta, thence to go to England with the rice and the indigo of his neighbours, before he and they can exchange food for cloth or cotton—and the larger the quantity they send the greater is the tendency to decline in price. With every extension of the system there is increasing inability to pay the taxes, and increasing necessity for seeking new markets in which to sell cloth and collect what are called rents—and the more wide the extension of the system the greater is the difficulty of collecting revenue sufficient for keeping the machine of government in motion. This difficulty it was that drove the representatives of British power and civilization into becoming traders in that pernicious drug, opium.

"The very best parts of India," as we are told,[100] were selected for the cultivation of the poppy. The people were told that they must either cultivate this plant, mate opium, or give up their land. If they refused, they were peremptorily told they must yield or quit. The same Company that forced them to grow opium said, You must sell the opium to us; and to them it was sold, and they gave the price they pleased to put upon the opium thus manufactured; and they then sold it to trading speculators at Calcutta, who caused it to be smuggled up the Canton River to an island called Lintin, and tea was received in exchange. At last, however, the emperor of China, after repeated threats, proceeded to execute summary justice; he seized every particle of opium; put under bond every European engaged in the merchandise of it; and the papers of to-day (1839) inform us that he has cut off the China trade, "root and branch."

Unhappily, however, the British nation deemed it expedient to make war upon the poor Chinese, and compel them to pay for the opium that had been destroyed; and now the profits of the Indian government from poisoning a whole people have risen from 1,500,000, at the date of the above extract, to the enormous sum of 3,500,000, or $16,800,000, and the market is, as we are informed, still extending itself.[101]

That the reader may see, and understand how directly the government is concerned in this effort at demoralizing and enslaving the Chinese, the following extract is given:—

"For the supply and manufacture of government opium there is a separate establishment. There are two great opium agencies at Ghazeepore and Patna, for the Benares and Bahar provinces. Each opium agent has several deputies in different districts, and a native establishment. They enter into contracts with the cultivators for the supply of opium at a rate fixed to meet the market. The land revenue authorities do not interfere, except to prevent cultivation without permission. Government merely bargains with the cultivators as cultivators, in the same way as a private merchant would, and makes advances to them for the cultivation. The only difficulty found is to prevent, their cultivating too much, as the rates are favourable, government a sure purchaser, and the cultivation liked. The land cultivated is measured, and precaution is taken that the produce is all sold to government. The raw opium thus received is sent to the head agency, where it is manufactured, packed in chests, and sealed with the Company's seal."[102]

It would seem to the author of this paragraph almost a matter of rejoicing that the Chinese are bound to continue large consumers of the drug. "The failure of one attempt to exclude it has shown," as he thinks—

"That they are not likely to effect that object; and if we do not supply them, some one else will; but the worst of it is, according to some people, that if the Chinese only legalized the cultivation in their own country, they could produce it much cheaper, and our market would be ruined. Both for their sakes and ours we must hope that it is not so, or that they will not find it out."[103]

Need we wonder, when gentlemen find pleasure in the idea of an increasing revenue from forcing this trade in despite of all the efforts of the more civilized Chinese government, that "intemperance increases" where the British "rule and system has been long established?" Assuredly not. Poor governments are, as we everywhere see, driven to encourage gambling, drunkenness, and other immoralities, as a means of extracting revenue from their unfortunate taxpayers; and the greater the revenue thus obtained, the poorer become the people and the weaker the government. Need we be surprised that that of India should be reduced to become manufacturer and smuggler of opium, when the people are forced to exhaust the land by sending away its raw products, and when the restraints upon the mere collection of domestic salt are so great that English salt now finds a market in India? The following passage on this subject is worthy of the perusal of those who desire fully to understand how it is that the people of that country are restrained in the application of their labour, and why it is that labour is so badly paid:—

"But those who cry out in England against the monopoly, and their unjust exclusion from the salt trade, are egregiously mistaken. As concerns them there is positively no monopoly, but the most absolute free trade. And, more than this, the only effect of the present mode of manufacture in Bengal is to give them a market which they would never otherwise have. A government manufacture of salt is doubtless more expensive than a private manufacture; but the result of this, and of the equality of duty on bad and good salt, is, that fine English salt now more or less finds a market in India; whereas, were the salt duty and all government interference discontinued to- morrow, the cheap Bengal salt would be sold at such a rate that not a pound of English or any other foreign salt could be brought into the market."[104]

Nevertheless, the system is regarded as one of perfect free trade!

Notwithstanding all these efforts at maintaining the revenue, the debt has increased the last twelve years no less than 15,000,000, or seventy-two millions of dollars; and yet the government is absolute proprietor of all the land of India, and enjoys so large a portion of the beneficial interest in it, that private property therein is reduced to a sum absolutely insignificant, as will now be shown.

The gross land revenue obtained from a country with an area of 491,448 square miles, or above three hundred millions of acres, is 151,786,743 rupees, equal to fifteen millions of pounds sterling, or seventy-two millions of dollars.[105] What is the value of private rights of property, subject to the payment of this tax, or rent, may be judged from the following facts:—In 1848-9 there were sold for taxes, in that portion of the country subject to the permanent settlement, 1169 estates, at something less than four years' purchase of the tax. Further south, in the Madras government, where the ryotwar settlement is in full operation, the land "would be sold" for balances of rent, but "generally it is not," as we are told, "and for a very good reason, viz. that nobody will buy it." Private rights in land being there of no value whatsoever, "the collector of Salem," as Mr. Campbell informs us—

"Navely mentions 'various unauthorized modes of stimulating the tardy,' rarely resorted to by heads of villages; such as 'placing him in the sun, obliging him to stand on one leg, or to sit with his head confined between his knees.'"[106]

In the north-west provinces, "the settlement," as our author states, "has certainly been successful in giving a good market value to landed property;" that is, it sells at about "four years' purchase on the revenue."[107] Still further north, in the newly acquired provinces, we find great industry, "every thing turned to account," the assessment, to which the Company succeeded on the deposition of the successors of Runjeet Singh, more easy, and land more valuable.[108] The value of land, like that of labour, therefore increases as we pass from the old to the new settlements, being precisely the reverse of what would be the case if the system tended to the enfranchisement and elevation of the people, and precisely what should be looked for in a country whose inhabitants were passing from freedom toward slavery.

With the data thus obtained we may now ascertain, with perhaps some approach to accuracy, the value of all the private rights in the land of India. In no case does that subject to tax appear to be worth more than four years' purchase, while in a very large portion of the country it would seem to be worth absolutely nothing. There are, however, some tax-free lands that may he set off against those held under the ryotwar settlement; and it is therefore possible that the whole are worth four years' purchase, which would give 288 millions of dollars, or 60 millions of pounds sterling, as the value of all the rights in land acquired by the people of India by all the labour of their predecessors and themselves in the many thousands of years it has been cultivated. The few people that have occupied the little and sandy State of New Jersey, with its area of 6900 square miles, have acquired rights in and on the land that are valued, subject to the claims of government, at 150 millions of dollars; and the few that have occupied the little island on which stands the city of New York have acquired rights that would sell in the market for at least one-half more than could be obtained for all the proprietary rights to land in India, with 300 millions of acres and 96 millions of inhabitants!

"Under the native princes," says Mr. Campbell, "India was a paying country." Under British rule, it has ceased to be so, because under that rule all power of combined action has been annihilated, or is in train to be, and will be so, by aid of the system that looks to compelling the whole people, men, women, and children, to work in the field, producing commodities to be exported in their raw state. Every act of association is an act of trade, and whatever tends to destroy association must destroy trade. The internal commerce of India declines steadily, and the external amounts to but about half a dollar per head, and no effort can make it grow to any extent. The returns of last year, of English trade, show a diminution as compared with those of the previous one, whereas with almost all other countries there is a large increase. Cuba exports to the large amount of twenty-five dollars per head, or almost fifty times as much as India; and she takes of cotton goods from England four times as much per head; and this she does because it is a part of the policy of Spain to bring about combination of action, and to enable the planter and the artisan to work together, whereas the policy of England is to destroy everywhere the power of association, and thus to destroy the domestic trade, upon which the foreign one must be built. Centralization is adverse to trade, and to the freedom of man. Spain does not seek to establish centralization. Provided she receives a given amount of revenue, she is content to permit her subjects to employ themselves at raising sugar or making cloth, as they please, and thus to advance in civilization; and by this very course it is that she is enabled to obtain revenue. How centralization operates on the people and the revenue, and how far it tends to promote the civilization or the freedom of man, may be seen, on a perusal of the following extract from a recent speech of Mr. Anstey, in the British House of Commons:—

"Such was the financial condition of India, which the right honourable gentleman believed to be so excellent. The intelligent natives of India, however, who visited this country, were not of that opinion. They told us that the complaints sent from India to this country were disregarded here, and that they always would be disregarded as long as inquiry into them was imperial, not local. They stated that their condition was one of hopeless misery, and that it had been so ever since they came under our rule. The result was, that cholera had become the normal order of things in that country, and in India it never died out. It appeared from the reports of medical officers in the army that it did not attack the rich and well-fed so frequently as it attacked the poor, and that among them it had made the most fearful ravages. The first authentic account they had of the appearance of the cholera in India was coincident with the imposition of the salt monopoly by Warren Hastings; and by a just retribution it had visited their own shores, showing them with what a scourge they had so long afflicted the natives of India. It might be said of the other taxes that, in one form or another, they affected every branch of industry and every necessary of life. They affected even the tools of trade, and were sometimes equal in amount to the sum for which the tool itself could be purchased in the market.

"When on a former occasion he had mentioned those facts before a member of the court of directors, he was told that if he had seen the papers in the archives, he would perceive that an alteration had taken place; but he found, on an inspection of the papers, that the result to the purchaser of salt is almost equal to what it had been. It was a well known fact that the natives dare not complain. When they asked for protection from the laws, they were treated as Juttee Persaud had been treated last year—cases were fabricated against them, and they were prosecuted for their lives. With the examples before them of Nuncomar and Juttee Persaud, it was not surprising that the natives were so backward in bringing to justice the persons whose oppressions had been so great."

It was in the face of facts like those here presented, and other similar ones presented to us in the history of Jamaica, that in a recent despatch Lord Palmerston thus instructed his minister at Madrid:—

"I have to instruct your lordship to observe to M. de Miraflores that the slaves of Cuba form a large portion, and by no means an unimportant one, of the population of Cuba; and that any steps taken to provide for their emancipation would, therefore, as far as the black population is concerned, be quite in unison with the recommendation made by her Majesty's government, that measures should be adopted for contenting the people of Cuba, with a view to secure the connection between that island and the Spanish crown; and it must be evident that if the negro population of Cuba were rendered free, that fact would create a most powerful element of resistance to any scheme for annexing Cuba to the United States, where slavery still exists.

"With regard to the bearing which negro emancipation would have on the interests of the white proprietors, it may safely be affirmed that free labour costs less than slave labour, and it is indisputable that a free and contented peasantry are safer neighbours for the wealthy classes above them than ill-treated and resentful slaves; and that slaves must, from the nature of things, be more or less ill-treated, is a truth which belongs to the inherent principles of human nature, and is quite as inevitable as the resentment, however suppressed it may be, which is the consequence of ill-treatment."

The negroes of Jamaica have never been permitted to apply their spare labour even to the refining of their own sugar, nor are they so at this day. They must export it raw, and the more they send the lower is the price and the larger the proportion taken by the government—but the poor negro is ruined. Spain, on the contrary, permits the Cubans to engage in any pursuits they may deem most likely to afford them a return to labour and capital; and, as a necessary consequence of this, towns and cities grow up, capital is attracted to the land, which becomes from day to day more valuable, labour is in demand, and there is a gradual, though slow, improvement of condition. The power to resort to other modes of employment diminishes the necessity for exporting sugar, and when exported to Spain, the producer is enabled to take for himself nearly the whole price paid by the consumer, the government claiming only a duty of fifteen per cent.

The Hindoo, like the negro, is shut out from the workshop. If he attempts to convert his cotton into yarn, his spindle is taxed in nearly all of the profit it can yield him. If he attempts to make cloth, his loom is subjected to a heavy tax, from which that of his wealthy English competitor is exempt. His iron ore and his coal must remain in the ground, and if he dares to apply his labour even to the collection of the salt which crystallizes before his door, he is punished by fine and imprisonment. He must raise sugar to be transported to England, there to be exchanged, perhaps, for English salt. For the sugar, arrived in that country, the workman pays at the rate perhaps of forty shillings a hundred, of which the government claims one-third, the ship owner, the merchant, and others, another third, and the remaining third is to be fought for by the agents of the Company, anxious for revenue, and the poor ryot, anxious to obtain a little salt to eat with his rice, and as much of his neighbour's cotton, in the form of English cloth, as will suffice to cover his loins.

Under the Spanish system capital increases, and labour is so valuable that slaves still continue to be imported. Under the English one, labour is valueless, and men sell themselves for long years of slavery at the sugar culture in the Mauritius, in Jamaica, and in Guiana. In all countries to which men are attracted, civilization tends upward; but in all those from which men fly, it tends downward.

At the moment this despatch was being written by Lord Palmerston, Mr. Campbell was writing his book, in which it is everywhere shown that the tendency of India toward centralization and absenteeism, and therefore toward exhaustion and slavery, is rapidly on the increase. "The communication with India," as he says—

"Is every day so much increased and facilitated that we become more and more entirely free from native influence, and the disposition to Hindooize, which at first certainly showed itself, has altogether disappeared. The English in India have now become as English as in England.

"While this state of things has great advantages, it has also some disadvantage in the want of local knowledge, and of permanency in the tenure of appointments which results. As there has been a constant succession of total strangers in every appointment, it follows that the government must be entirely carried on upon general principles, with little aid from local knowledge and experience."—P. 202.

The tendency toward the transfer of English capital to India, as he informs us, retrogrades instead of advancing, and this is precisely what we might expect to find to be the case. Capital never seeks a country from which men are flying as they now fly from India. The English houses bring none, but being in general mere speculators, they borrow largely and enter into large operations, and when the bubble bursts, the poor Hindoo suffers in the prostration of trade and decline in the prices of cotton and sugar. "The consequence is," as Mr. Campbell says—

"That European speculation has retrograded. Far up the country, where the agents of the old houses were formerly numerous and well supplied with money, the planters are now few and needy, and generally earn but a precarious subsistence as in fact the servants of native capitalists."—P. 204.

Iron, by aid of which the people might improve their processes of cultivation and manufacture, has little tendency toward India. The average export of it to that country in 1845 and '46 was but 13,000 tons, value 160,000, or about two-pence worth for every five of the population. Efforts are now being made for the construction of railroads, but their object is that of carrying out the system of centralization, and thus still further destroying the power of association, because they look to the annihilation of what still remains of domestic manufacture, and thus cheapening cotton. With all the improvements in the transportation of that commodity, its poor cultivator obtains less for it than he did thirty years since, and the effect of further improvement can be none other than that of producing a still further reduction, and still further deterioration of the condition of the men who raise food and cotton. As yet the power of association continues in the Punjab, but it is proposed now to hold there great fairs for the sale of English manufactures, and the day cannot be far distant when the condition of the people of the new provinces will be similar to that of those of the old ones, as no effort will be spared to carry out the system which looks to driving the whole people to agriculture, and thus compelling them to exhaust their land. It is needed, says Mr. Chapman, the great advocate of railways in India, that the connection between "the Indian grower and English spinner" become more intimate, and "the more the English is made to outweigh the native home demand, the more strongly will the native agriculturist feel that his personal success depends on securing and improving his British connection"[109]6750—that is, the more the natives can be prevented from combining, their labours, the greater, as Mr. Chapman thinks, will be the prosperity of India. Centralization has impoverished, and to a considerable extent depopulated, that country, but its work is not yet done. It remains yet to reduce the people of the Punjab, of Affghanistan and Burmah, to the condition of the Bengalese.

The Burmese war is, as we are informed, "connected with at least certain hopes of getting across to China through the Burmese territories,"[110] and, of course of extending the trade in opium throughout the whole of interior China; and the revenue from that source will pay the cost of annexation. It is by aid of this powerful narcotic, probably, that "civilization" is about, as we are told, to "plant her standard on the ruins of kingdoms which for thousands of years have been smouldering into dust."[111]

We are often told of "the dim moral perceptions" of the people of India, and as many of those who will read this volume may be disposed to think that the cause of poverty lies in some deficiencies in the character of the Hindoo, it may not be improper, with a view to the correction of that opinion, to offer a few passages from the very interesting work of Colonel Sleeman, who furnishes more information on that head than any other recent traveller or resident; and his remarks are the more valuable because of being the fruit of many years of observation:—

"Sir Thomas Munro has justly observed, 'I do not exactly know what is meant by civilizing the people of India. In the theory and practice of good government they may be deficient; but if a good system of agriculture—if unrivalled manufactures—if a capacity to produce what convenience or luxury demands—if the establishment of schools for reading and writing—if the general practice of kindness and hospitality—and above all, if a scrupulous respect and delicacy toward the female sex are amongst the points that denote a civilized people; then the Hindoos are not inferior in civilization to the people of Europe.—Rambles, vol. i. 4.

"Our tents were pitched upon a green sward on one bank of a small stream running into the Nerbudda close by, while the multitude occupied the other bank. At night all the tents and booths are illuminated, and the scene is hardly less animating by night than by day; but what strikes an European most is the entire absence of all tumult and disorder at such places. He not only sees no disturbance, but feels assured that there will be none; and leaves his wife and children in the midst of a crowd of a hundred thousand persons all strangers to them, and all speaking a language and following a religion different from theirs, while he goes off the whole day, hunting and shooting in the distant jungles, without the slightest feeling of apprehension for their safety or comfort."—Ibid. 2.

"I am much attached to the agricultural classes of India generally, and I have found among them some of the best men I have ever known. The peasantry in India have generally very good manners, and are exceedingly intelligent, from having so much more leisure, and unreserved and easy intercourse with those above them."—Ibid. 76.

"I must say, that I have never either seen or read of a nobler spirit than seems to animate all classes of these communities in India on such distressing occasions."—Ibid. 197.

"There is no part of the world, I believe, where parents are so much reverenced by their sons as they are in India in all classes of society."—Ibid. 330.

"An instance of deliberate fraud or falsehood among native merchants of respectable stations in society, is extremely rare. Among the many hundreds of bills I have had to take from them for private remittances, I have never had one dishonoured, or the payment upon one delayed beyond the day specified; nor do I recollect ever hearing of one who had. They are so careful not to speculate beyond their means, that an instance of failure is extremely rare among them. No one ever in India hears of families reduced to ruin or distress by the failure of merchants and bankers; though here, as in all other countries advanced in the arts, a vast number of families subsist upon the interest of money employed by them.

"There is no class of men more interested in the stability of our rule in India than this of the respectable merchants; nor is there any upon whom the welfare of our government, and that of the people, more depend. Frugal, first, upon principle, that they may not in their expenditure encroach upon their capitals, they become so by habit; and when they advance in life they lay out their accumulated wealth in the formation of those works which shall secure for them, from generation to generation, the blessings of the people of the towns in which they have resided, and those of the country around. It would not be too much to say, that one-half the great works which embellish and enrich the face of India, in tanks, groves, wells, temples, &c., have been formed by this class of the people solely with the view of securing the blessings of mankind by contributing to their happiness in solid and permanent works."—Ibid. vol. ii. 142.

"In the year 1829, while I held the civil charge of the district of Jubbulpore, in this valley of the Nerbudda, I caused an estimate to be made of the public works of ornament and utility it contained. The population of the district at that time amounted to five hundred thousand souls, distributed among four thousand and fifty-three occupied towns, villages, and hamlets. There were one thousand villages more which had formerly been occupied, but were then deserted. There were two thousand two hundred and eighty-eight tanks, two hundred and nine bowlies, or large wells, with flights of steps extending from the top down to the water when in its lowest stage; fifteen hundred and sixty wells lined with brick and stone, cemented with lime, but without stairs; three hundred and sixty Hindoo temples, and twenty-two Mohammedan mosques. The estimated cost of these works in grain at the present price, that is the quantity that would have been consumed, had the labour been paid in kind at the present ordinary rate, was eighty-six lacks, sixty-six thousand and forty-three rupees (86,66,043,) 866,604 sterling.

"The labourer was estimated to be paid at the rate of about two- thirds the quantity of corn he would get in England if paid in kind, and corn sells here at about one-third the price it fetches in average seasons in England. In Europe, therefore, these works, supposing the labour equally efficient, would have cost at least four times the sum here estimated; and such works formed by private individuals for the public good, without any view whatever to return in profits, indicates a very high degree of public spirit.

"The whole annual rent of the lands of this district amounts to about six hundred and fifty thousand rupees a year, (65,000 sterling,) that is, five hundred thousand demandable by the government, and one hundred and fifty thousand by those who hold the lands at lease immediately under government, over and above what may be considered as the profits of their stock as farmers. These works must, therefore, have cost about thirteen times the amount of the annual rent of the whole of the lands of the districts—or the whole annual rent for above thirteen years!"—Ibid, vol. ii. 194.

We have here private rights in land amounting to 150,000 rupees, in a country abounding in coal and iron ore,[112] and with a population of half a million of people. Estimating the private interest at ten years' purchase, it is exactly three years' purchase of the land-tax; and it follows of course, that the government takes every year one-fourth of the whole value of the property,—at which rate the little State of New Jersey, with its half-million of inhabitants, would pay annually above thirty millions of dollars for the support of those who were charged with the administration of its affairs! Need we wonder at the poverty of India when thus taxed, while deprived of all power even to manure its land?

"Three-fourths of the recruits for our Bengal native infantry are drawn from the Rajpoot peasantry of the kingdom of Oude, on the left bank of the Ganges, where their affections have been linked to the soil for a long series of generations. The good feelings of the families from which they are drawn, continue, through the whole period of their service, to exercise a salutary influence over their conduct as men and as soldiers. Though they never take their families with them, they visit them on furlough every two or three years, and always return to them when the surgeon considers a change of air necessary to their recovery from sickness. Their family circles are always present to their imaginations; and the recollections of their last visit, the hopes of the next, and the assurance that their conduct as men and as soldiers in the interval will be reported to those circles by their many comrades, who are annually returning on furlough to the same parts of the country, tend to produce a general and uniform propriety of conduct, that is hardly to be found among the soldiers of any other army in the world, and which seems incomprehensible to those who are unacquainted with its source,—veneration for parents cherished through life and a never impaired love of home, and of all the dear objects by which it is constituted."—Ibid. vol. ii. 415.

Such are the people that we see now forced to abandon a land of which not more than half the cultivable part is in cultivation—a land that abounds in every description of mineral wealth—and to sell themselves for long years of service, apart from wives, children, and friends, to be employed in the most unhealthful of all pursuits, the cultivation of sugar in the Mauritius, and the Sandwich Islands, and among the swamps of British Guiana, and Jamaica, and for a reward of four or five rupees ($2 to $2.50) per month. What was their condition in the Mauritius is thus shown by an intelligent and honest visitor of the island in 1838:—

"After the passage of the act abolishing slavery, an arrangement was sanctioned by the Colonial Government, for the introduction of a great number of Indian labourers into the colony. They were engaged at five rupees, equal to ten shillings, a month, for five years, with also one pound of rice, a quarter of a pound of dhall, or grain, a kind of pulse, and one ounce of butter, of ghee, daily. But for every day they were absent from their work they were to return two days to their masters, who retained one rupee per month, to pay an advance made of six months' wages, and to defray the expense of their passage. If these men came into Port Louis to complain of their masters, they were lodged in the Bagne prison, till their masters were summoned. The masters had a great advantage before the magistrates over their servants: the latter being foreigners, but few of them could speak French, and they had no one to assist them in pleading their cause. They universally represented themselves as having been deceived with respect to the kind of labour to be exacted from them. But perhaps the greatest evil attendant on their introduction into the Mauritius was the small proportion of females imported with them, only about two hundred being brought with upward of ten thousand men. It was evident that unless the system of employing them were closely watched, there was a danger that it might ultimately grow into another species of slavery."[113]

We see thus that while the females of India are deprived of all power to employ themselves in the lighter labour of manufacture, the men are forced to emigrate, leaving behind their wives and daughters, to support themselves as best they may. The same author furnishes an account of the Indian convicts that had been transported to the island, as follows:—

"Among the Indian convicts working on the road, we noticed one wearing chains; several had a slight single ring round the ankle. They are lodged in huts with flat roofs, or in other inferior dwellings, near the road. There are about seven hundred of them in the island. What renders them peculiarly objects of sympathy is, that they were sent here for life, and no hope of any remission of sentence is held out to them for good conduct. Their's is a hopeless bondage; and though it is said by some that they are not hard worked, yet they are generally, perhaps constantly, breaking stones and mending the road, and in a tropical sun. There are among them persons who were so young when transported that, in their offences, they could only be looked on as the dupes of those that were older; and many of them bear good characters."[114]

At the date to which these passages refer there was a dreadful famine in India; but, "during the prevalence of this famine," as we are told,—

"Rice was going every hour out of the country. 230,371 bags of 164 pounds each—making 37,780,844 lbs.—were exported from Calcutta. Where? To the Mauritius, to feed the kidnapped Coolies. Yes: to feed the men who had been stolen from the banks of the Ganges and the hills adjacent, and dragged from their native shore, under pretence of going to one of the Company's villages, to grow in the island of Mauritius what they might have grown in abundance upon their own fertile, but over-taxed land. The total amount of rice exported from Calcutta, during the famine in 1838, was 151,923,696 lbs., besides 13,722,408 lbs. of other edible grains, which would have fed and kept alive all those who perished that year. Wives might have been saved to their husbands, babes to their mothers, friends to their friends; villages might still have been peopled; a sterile land might have been restored to verdure. Freshness and joy and the voices of gladness, might have been there. Now, all is stillness, and desolation, and death. Yet we are told we have nothing to do with India."[115]

The nation that exports raw produce must exhaust its land, and then it must export its men, who fly from famine, leaving the women and children to perish behind them.

By aid of continued Coolie immigration the export of sugar from the Mauritius has been doubled in the last sixteen years, having risen from 70 to 140 millions of pounds. Sugar is therefore very cheap, and the foreign competition is thereby driven from the British market. "Such conquests," however, says, very truly, the London Spectator—

"Don't always bring profit to the conqueror; nor does production itself prove prosperity. Competition for the possession of a field may be carried so far as to reduce prices below prime cost; and it is clear from the notorious facts of the West Indies—from the change of property, from the total unproductiveness of much property still—that the West India production of sugar has been carried on, not only without replacing capital, but with a constant sinking of capital."

The "free" Coolie and the "free negro" of Jamaica, have been urged to competition for the sale of sugar, and they seem likely to perish together; but compensation for this is found in the fact that—

"Free-trade has, in reducing the prices of commodities for home consumption, enabled the labourer to devote a greater share of his income toward purchasing clothing and luxuries, and has increased the home trade to an enormous extent."[116]

What effect this reduction of "the prices of commodities for home consumption" has had upon the poor Coolie, may be judged from the following passage:—

"I here beheld, for the first time, a class of beings of whom we have heard much, and for whom I have felt considerable interest. I refer to the Coolies imported by the British government to take the place of the faineant negroes, when the apprenticeship system was abolished. Those that I saw were wandering about the streets, dressed rather tastefully, but always meanly, and usually carrying over their shoulder a sort of chiffonier's sack, in which they threw whatever refuse stuff they found in the streets or received as charity. Their figures are generally superb; and their Eastern costume, to which they adhere as far as their poverty will permit of any clothing, sets off their lithe and graceful forms to great advantage. Their faces are almost uniformly of the finest classic mould, and illuminated by pairs of those dark swimming and propitiatory eyes, which exhaust the language of tenderness and passion at a glance.

"But they are the most inveterate mendicants on the island. It is said that those brought from the interior of India are faithful and efficient workmen, while those from Calcutta and its vicinity are good for nothing. Those that were prowling about the streets of Spanish-town and Kingston, I presume, were of the latter class, for there is not a planter on the island, it is said, from whom it would be more difficult to get any work than from one of these. They subsist by begging altogether: they are not vicious, nor intemperate, nor troublesome particularly, except as beggars. In that calling they have a pertinacity before which a Northern mendicant would grow pale. They will not be denied. They will stand perfectly still and look through a window from the street for a quarter of an hour, if not driven away, with their imploring eyes fixed upon you, like a stricken deer, without saying a word or moving a muscle. They act as if it were no disgrace for them to beg, as if the least indemnification which they are entitled to expect, for the outrage perpetrated upon them in bringing them from their distant homes to this strange island, is a daily supply of their few and cheap necessities, as they call for them.

"I confess that their begging did not leave upon my mind the impression produced by ordinary mendicancy. They do not look as if they ought to work. I never saw one smile, and though they showed no positive suffering, I never saw one look happy. Each face seemed to be constantly telling the unhappy story of their woes, and like fragments of a broken mirror, each reflecting in all its hateful proportions the national outrage of which they are the victims."[117]

The slave trade has taken a new form, the mild and gentle Hindoo having taken the place of the barbarous and fierce African; and this trade is likely to continue so long as it shall be held to be the chief object of the government of a Christian people to secure to its people cheap cotton and sugar, without regard to the destruction of life of which that cheapness is the cause. The people of England send to India missionary priests and bishops, but they obtain few converts; nor can it ever be otherwise under a system which tends to destroy the power of association, and thus prevents that diversification of employments that is indispensable to the improvement of physical, moral, intellectual, or political condition. May we not hope that at no very distant day they will arrive at the conclusion that such association is as necessary to the Hindoo as they know it to be to themselves, and that if they desire success in their attempts to bring the followers of Mohammed, or of Brahma, to an appreciation of the doctrines of Christ, they must show that their practice and their teachings are in some degree in harmony with each other? When that day shall come they will be seen endeavouring to remedy the evil they have caused, and permitting the poor Hindoo to obtain establishments in which labour may be combined for the production of iron and of machinery, by aid of which the native cotton may be twisted in the neighbourhood in which it is produced, thus enabling the now unhappy cultivator to exchange directly with his food-producing neighbour, relieved from the necessity for sending his products to a distance, to be brought back again in the form of yarn or cloth, at fifteen or twenty times the price at which he sold it in the form of cotton. That time arrived, they will appreciate the sound good sense contained in the following remarks of Colonel Sleeman:—

"If we had any great establishment of this sort in which Christians could find employment, and the means of religious and secular instruction, thousands of converts would soon flock to them; and they would become vast sources of future improvement in industry, social comfort, municipal institutions, and religion. What chiefly prevents the spread of Christianity in India is the dread of exclusion from caste and all its privileges; and the utter hopelessness of their ever finding any respectable circle of society of the adopted religion, which converts, or would be converts to Christianity, now everywhere feel. Form such circles for them—make the members of these circles happy in the exertion of honest and independent industry—let those who rise to eminence in them feel that they are considered as respectable and as important in the social system as the servants of government, and converts will flock around you from all parts, and from all classes of the Hindoo community. * * * I am persuaded that a dozen such establishments as that of Mr. Thomas Ashton, of Hyde, as described by a physician of Manchester, and noticed in Mr. Baines's admirable work on the Cotton Manufactures of Great Britain, (page 447,) would do more in the way of conversion among the people of India than has ever yet been done by all the religious establishments, or ever will be done by them without some such aid."—Vol. ii. 164.

That there is a steady increase in the tendency toward personal servitude, or slavery, in India, no one can doubt who will study carefully the books on that country; and it may not be amiss to inquire on whom rests the responsibility for this state of things. By several of the persons that have been quoted, Messrs. Thompson, Bright, and others, it is charged upon the Company; but none that read the works of Messrs. Campbell and Sleeman can hesitate to believe that the direction is now animated by a serious desire to improve the condition of its poor subjects. Unfortunately, however, the Company is nearly in the condition of the land-holders of Jamaica, and is itself tending toward ruin, because its subjects are limited to agriculture, and because they receive so small a portion of the value of their very small quantity of products. Now, as in the days of Joshua Gee, the largest portion of that value remains in England, whose people eat cheap sugar while its producer starves in India. Cheap sugar and cheap cotton are obtained by the sacrifice of the interests of a great nation; and while the policy of England shall continue to look to driving the women and children of India to the labours of the field, and the men to the raising of sugar in the Mauritius, the soil must continue to grow poorer, the people must become more and more enslaved, and the government must find itself more and more dependent for revenue on the power to poison the people of China; and therefore will it be seen that however good may be the intentions of the gentlemen charged with the duties of government, they must find themselves more and more compelled to grind the poor ryot in the hope of obtaining revenue.



CHAPTER XIII.

HOW SLAVERY GROWS IN IRELAND AND SCOTLAND.

The government which followed the completion of the Revolution of 1688, pledged itself to discountenance the woollen manufacture of Ireland, with a view to compel the export of raw wool to England, whence its exportation to foreign countries was prohibited; the effect of which was, of course, to enable the English manufacturer to purchase it at his own price. From that period forward we find numerous regulations as to the ports from which alone woollen yarn or cloth might go to England, and the ports of the latter through which it might come; while no effort was spared to induce the people of Ireland to abandon woollens and take to flax. Laws were passed prohibiting the export of Irish cloth and glass to the colonies. By other laws Irish ships were deprived of the benefit of the navigation laws. The fisheries were closed against them. No sugar could be imported from any place but Great Britain, and no drawback was allowed on its exportation to Ireland; and thus was the latter compelled to pay a tax for the support of the British government, while maintaining its own. All other colonial produce was required to be carried first to England, after which it might be shipped to Ireland; and as Irish shipping was excluded from the advantages of the navigation laws, it followed that the voyage of importation was to be made in British ships, manned by British seamen, and owned by British merchants, who were thus authorized to tax the people of Ireland for doing their work, while a large portion of the Irish people were themselves unemployed.

While thus prohibiting them from applying themselves to manufactures or trade, every inducement was held out to them to confine themselves to the production of commodities required by the English manufacturers, and wool, hemp, and flax were admitted into England free of duty. We see thus that the system of that day in reference to Ireland looked to limiting the people of that country, as it limited the slaves of Jamaica, and now limits the people of Hindostan, to agriculture alone, and thus depriving the men, the women, and the children of all employment except the labour of the field, and of all opportunity for intellectual improvement, such as elsewhere results from that association which necessarily accompanies improvement in the mechanic arts.

During our war of the Revolution, freedom of trade was claimed for Ireland; and as the demand was made at a time when a large portion of her people were under arms as volunteers, the merchants and manufacturers of England, who had so long acted as middlemen for the people of the sister kingdom, found themselves obliged to submit to the removal of some of the restrictions under which the latter had so long remained. Step by step changes were made, until at length, in 1783, Ireland was declared independent, shortly after which duties were imposed on various articles of foreign manufacture, avowedly with the intention of enabling her people to employ some of their surplus labour in converting her own food and wool, and the cotton wool of other countries, into cloth. Thenceforward manufactures and trade made considerable progress, and there was certainly a very considerable tendency toward improvement. Some idea of the condition of the country at that time, and of the vast and lamentable change that has since taken place, may be obtained from the consideration of a few facts connected with the manufacture of books in the closing years of the last century. The copyright laws not extending to Ireland, all books published in England might there be reprinted, and accordingly we find that all the principal English law reports of the day, very many of the earlier ones, and many of the best treatises, as well as the principal novels, travels, and miscellaneous works, were republished in Dublin, as may be seen by an examination of any of our old libraries. The publication of such books implies, of course, a considerable demand for them, and for Ireland herself, as the sale of books in this country was very small indeed, and there was then no other part of the world to which they could go. More books were probably published in Ireland in that day by a single house than are now required for the supply of the whole kingdom. With 1801, however, there came a change. By the Act of Union the copyright laws of England were extended to Ireland, and at once the large and growing manufacture of books was prostrated. The patent laws were also extended to Ireland; and as England had so long monopolized the manufacturing machinery then in use, it was clear that it was there improvements would be made, and that thenceforth the manufactures of Ireland must retrograde. Manchester had the home market, the foreign market, and, to no small extent, that of Ireland open to her; while the manufacturers of the latter were forced to contend for existence, and under the most disadvantageous circumstances, on their own soil. The one could afford to purchase expensive machinery, and to adopt whatever improvements might be made, while the other could not. The natural consequence was, that Irish manufactures gradually disappeared as the Act of Union came into effect. By virtue of its provisions, the duties established by the Irish Parliament for the purpose of protecting the farmers of Ireland in their efforts to bring the loom and the anvil into close proximity with the plough and the harrow, were gradually to diminish, and free trade was to be fully established; or, in other words, Manchester and Birmingham were to have a monopoly of supplying Ireland with cloth and iron. The duty on English woollens was to continue twenty years. The almost prohibitory duties on English calicoes and muslins were to continue until 1808; after which they were to be gradually diminished, until in 1821 they were to cease. Those on cotton yarn were to cease in 1810. The effect of this in diminishing the demand for Irish labour, is seen in the following comparative view of manufactures at the date of the Union, and at different periods in the ensuing forty years, here given:—

Dublin, 1800, Master woollen manufacturers. 91... 1840, 12 " Hands employee............. 4918... " , 602 " Master wool-combers........ 30... 1834, 5 " Hands employed............. 230... " , 63 " Carpet manufacturers....... 13... 1841, 1 " Hands employed............. 720... " none

Kilkenny, 1800, Blanket manufacturers...... 56... 1822, 42 " Hands employed............. 3000... 1822, 925

Dublin, 1800, Silk-loom wearers at work.. 2500... 1840, 250 Balbriggan, 1799, Calico looms at work..... 2500... 1841, 226 Wicklow, 1800, Hand-looms at work......... 1000... 1841, none

Cork, 1800, Braid weavers.............. 1000... 1834, 40 " Worsted weavers............ 2000... " 90 " Hoosiers................... 300... " 28 " Wool-combers............... 700... " 110 " Cotton weavers............. 2000... " 220 " Linen cheek weavers........ 600... " none " Cotton spinners, bleachers, calico printers....... thousands... " none

"For nearly half a century Ireland has had perfectly free trade with the richest country in the world; and what," says the author of a recent work of great ability,—

"Has that free trade done for her? She has even now," he continues, "no employment for her teeming population except upon the land. She ought to have had, and might easily have had, other and various employments, and plenty of it. Are we to believe," says he, "the calumny that the Irish are lazy and won't work? Is Irish human nature different from other human nature? Are not the most laborious of all labourers in London and New York, Irishmen? Are Irishmen inferior in understanding? We Englishmen who have personally known Irishmen, in the army, at the bar, and in the church, know that there is no better head than a disciplined Irish one. But in all these cases that master of industry, the stomach, has been well satisfied. Let an Englishman exchange his bread and beer, and beef, and mutton, for no breakfast, for a lukewarm lumper at dinner, and no supper. With such a diet, how much better is he than an Irishman—a Celt, as he calls him? No, the truth is, that the misery of Ireland is not from the human nature that grows there—it is from England's perverse legislation, past and present."[118]

Deprived of all employment, except in the labour of agriculture, land became, of course, the great object of pursuit. "Land is life," had said, most truly and emphatically, Chief Justice Blackburn; and the people had now before them the choice between the occupation of land, at any rent, or starvation. The lord of the land was thus enabled to dictate his own terms, and therefore it has been that we have heard of the payment of five, six, eight, and even as much as ten pounds per acre. "Enormous rents, low wages, farms of an enormous extent, let by rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land-jobbers, to be relet by intermediate oppressors, for five times their value, among the wretched starvers on potatoes and water," led to a constant succession of outrages, followed by Insurrection Acts, Arms Acts, and Coercion Acts, when the real remedy was to be found in the adoption of a system that would emancipate the country from the tyranny of the spindle and the loom, and permit the labour of Ireland to find employment at home.

That employment could not be had. With the suppression of Irish manufactures the demand for labour had disappeared. An English traveller, describing the state of Ireland in 1834, thirteen years after the free-trade provisions of the Act of Union had come fully into operation, furnishes numerous facts, some of which will now be given, showing that the people were compelled to remain idle, although willing to work at the lowest wages—such wages as could not by any possibility enable them to do more than merely sustain life, and perhaps not even that.

CASHEL.—"Wages here only eightpence a day, and numbers altogether without employment."

CAHIR.—"I noticed, on Sunday, on coming from church, the streets crowded with labourers, with spades and other implements in their hands, standing to be hired; and I ascertained that any number of these men might have been engaged, on constant employment, at sixpence per day without diet."

WICKLOW.—"The husband of this woman was a labourer, at sixpence a day, eighty of which sixpences—that is, eighty days' labour—were absorbed in the rent of the cabin." "In another cabin was a decently dressed woman with five children, and her husband was also a labourer at sixpence a day. The pig had been taken for rent a few days before." "I found some labourers receiving only fourpence per day."

KILKENNY.—"Upward of 2000 persons totally without employment." "I visited the factories that used to support 200 men with their families, and how many men did I find at work? ONE MAN! In place of finding men occupied, I saw them in scores, like spectres, walking about, and lying about the mill. I saw immense piles of goods completed, but for which there was no sale. I saw heaps of blankets, and I saw every loom idle. As for the carpets which had excited the jealousy and the fears of Kidderminster, not one had been made for seven months. To convey an idea of the destitution of these people, I mention, that when an order recently arrived for the manufacture of as many blankets for the police as would have kept the men at work for a few days, bonfires were lighted about the country—not bonfires to communicate insurrection, but to evince joy that a few starving men were about to earn bread to support their families. Nevertheless, we are told that Irishmen will not work at home."

CALLEN.—"In this town, containing between four and five thousand inhabitants, at least one thousand are without regular employment, six or seven hundred entirely destitute, and there are upward of two hundred mendicants in the town—persons incapable of work."—Inglis's Ireland in 1834.

Such was the picture everywhere presented to the eye of this intelligent traveller. Go where he might, he found hundreds anxious for employment, yet no employment could be had, unless they could travel to England, there to spend weeks in travelling round the country in quest of days of employment, the wages for which might enable them to pay their rent at home. "The Celt," says the Times, "is the hewer of wood and the drawer of water to the Saxon; The great works of this country," it continues "depend on cheap labour." The labour of the slave is always low in price. The people of Ireland were interdicted all employment but in the cultivation of the land, and men, women, and children were forced to waste more labour than would have paid twenty times over for all the British manufactures they could purchase. They were passing rapidly toward barbarism, and for the sole reason that they were denied all power of association for any useful purpose. What was the impression produced by their appearance on the mind of foreigners may be seen by the following extract from the work of a well-known and highly intelligent German traveller:—

"A Russian peasant, no doubt, is the slave of a harder master, but still he is fed and housed to his content, and no trace of mendicancy is to be seen in him. The Hungarians are certainly not among the best-used people in the world; still, what fine wheaten bread and what wine has even the humblest among them for his daily fare! The Hungarian would scarcely believe it, if he were to be told there was a country in which the inhabitants must content themselves with potatoes every alternate day in the year.

"Servia and Bosnia are reckoned among the most wretched countries of Europe, and certainly the appearance of one of their villages has little that is attractive about it; but at least the people, if badly housed, are well clad. We look not for much luxury or comfort among the Tartars of the Crimea; we call them poor and barbarous, but, good heavens! they look at least like human creatures. They have a national costume, their houses are habitable, their orchards are carefully tended, and their gayly harnessed ponies are mostly in good condition. An Irishman has nothing national about him but his rags,—his habitation is without a plan, his domestic economy without rule or law. We have beggars and paupers among us, but they form at least an exception; whereas, in Ireland, beggary or abject poverty is the prevailing rule. The nation is one of beggars, and they who are above beggary seem to form the exception.

"The African negroes go naked, but then they have a tropical sun to warm them. The Irish are little removed from a state of nakedness; and their climate, though not cold, is cool, and extremely humid. * * *

"There are nations of slaves, but they have, by long custom, been made unconscious of the yoke of slavery. This is not the case with the Irish, who have a strong feeling of liberty within them, and are fully sensible of the weight of the yoke they have to bear. They are intelligent enough to know the injustice done them by the distorted laws of their country; and while they are themselves enduring the extreme of poverty, they have frequently before them, in the manner of life of their English landlords, a spectacle of the most refined luxury that human ingenuity ever invented."—Kohl's Travels in Ireland.

It might be thought, however, that Ireland was deficient in the capital required for obtaining the machinery of manufacture to enable her people to maintain competition with her powerful neighbour. We know, however, that previous to the Union she had that machinery; and from the date of that arrangement, so fraudulently brought about, by which was settled conclusively the destruction of Irish manufactures, the annual waste of labour was greater than the whole amount of capital then employed in the cotton and woollen manufactures of England. From that date the people of Ireland were thrown, from year to year, more into the hands of middlemen, who accumulated fortunes that they would not invest in the improvement of land, and could not, under the system which prostrated manufactures, invest in machinery of any kind calculated to render labour productive; and all their accumulations were sent therefore to England for investment. An official document published by the British government shows that the transfers of British securities from England to Ireland, that is to say, the investment of Irish capital in England, in the thirteen years following the final adoption of free trade in 1821, amounted to as many millions of pounds sterling; and thus was Ireland forced to contribute cheap labour and cheap capital to building up "the great works of Britain." Further, it was provided by law that whenever the poor people of a neighbourhood contributed to a saving fund, the amount should not be applied in any manner calculated to furnish local employment, but should be transferred for investment in the British funds. The landlords fled to England, and their rent followed them. The middlemen sent their capital to England. The trader or the labourer that could accumulate a little capital saw it sent to England; and he was then compelled to follow it. Such is the history of the origin of the present abandonment of Ireland by its inhabitants.

The form in which rents, profits, and savings, as well as taxes, went to England, was that of raw products of the soil, to be consumed abroad, yielding nothing to be returned to the land, which was of course impoverished. The average export of grain in the first three years following the passage of the Act of Union was about 300,000 quarters, but as the domestic market gradually disappeared, the export of raw produce increased, until, at the close of twenty years it exceeded a million of quarters; and at the date of Mr. Inglis's visit it had reached an average of two and a half millions, or 22,500,000 of our bushels. The poor people were, in fact, selling their soil to pay for cotton and woollen goods that they should have manufactured themselves, for coal which abounded among themselves, for iron, all the materials of which existed at home in great profusion, and for a small quantity of tea, sugar, and other foreign commodities, while the amount required to pay rent to absentees, and interest to mortgagees, was estimated at more than thirty millions of dollars. Here was a drain that no nation could bear, however great its productive power; and the whole of it was due to the system which forbade the application of labour, talent, or capital to any thing but agriculture, and thus forbade advance in civilization. The inducements to remain at home steadily diminished. Those who could live without labour found that society had changed; and they fled to England, France, or Italy. Those who desired to work, and felt that they were qualified for something beyond mere manual labour, fled to England or America; and thus by degrees was the unfortunate country depleted of every thing that could render it a home in which to remain, while those who could not fly remained to be, as the Times so well describes it, mere "hewers of wood and drawers of water to the Saxon," happy when a full-grown man could find employment at sixpence a day, and that, too, without food.

"Throughout the west and south of Ireland," said an English traveller in 1842, four years before the exhaustion of the soil had produced disease among the potatoes—

"The traveller is haunted by the face of the popular starvation. It is not the exception—it is the condition of the people. In this fairest and richest of countries, men are suffering and starving by millions. There are thousands of them, at this minute, stretched in the sunshine at their cabin doors with no work, scarcely any food, no hope seemingly. Strong countrymen are lying in bed, 'for the hunger'—because a man lying on his back does not need so much food as a person afoot. Many of them have torn up the unripe potatoes from their little gardens, and to exist now must look to winter, when they shall have to suffer starvation and cold too."—Thackeray.

"Everywhere," said the Quarterly Review, "throughout all parts, even in the best towns, and in Dublin itself, you will meet men and boys—not dressed, not covered—but hung round with a collection of rags of unrivalled variety, squalidity, and filth—walking dunghills. * * * No one ever saw an English scarecrow with such rags."

The difference in the condition of these poor people and that of the slave—even the slave of Jamaica at that day—consisted in this, that the negro slave was worth buying, whereas the others were not; and we know well that the man who pays a good price for a commodity, attaches to it a value that induces him to give some care to its preservation; whereas he cares nothing for another that he finds himself forced to accept. "Starving by millions," as they are here described, death was perpetually separating husbands and wives, parents and children, while to the survivors remained no hope but that of being enabled at some time or other to fly to another land in which they might be permitted to sell their labour for food sufficient to support life.

The existence of such a state of things was, said the advocates of the system which looks to converting all the world outside of England into one great farm, to be accounted for by the fact that the population was too numerous for the land, and yet a third of the surface, including the richest lands in the kingdom, was lying unoccupied and waste.

"Of single counties," said an English writer, "Mayo, with a population of 389,000, and a rental of only 300,000, has an area of 1,364,000 acres, of which 800,000 are waste! No less than 470,000 acres, being very nearly equal to the whole extent of surface now under cultivation, are declared to be reclaimable. Galway, with a population of 423,000, and a valued rental of 433,000, has upward of 700,000 acres of waste, 410,000 of which are reclaimable! Kerry, with a population of 293,000, has an area of 1,186,000 acres—727,000 being waste, and 400,000 of them reclaimable! Even the Union of Glenties, Lord Monteagle's ne plus ultra of redundant population, has an area of 245,000 acres, of which 200,000 are waste, and for the most part reclaimable, to its population of 43,000. While the Barony of Ennis, that abomination of desolation, has 230,000 acres of land to its 5000 paupers—a proportion which, as Mr. Carter, one of the principal proprietors, remarks in his circular advertisement for tenants, 'is at the rate of only one family to 230 acres; so that if but one head of a family were employed to every 230 acres, there need not be a single pauper in the entire district; a proof,' he adds, 'THAT NOTHING BUT EMPLOYMENT IS WANTING TO SET THIS COUNTRY TO RIGHTS!' In which opinion we fully coincide."

Nothing but employment was needed, but that could not be found under the system which has caused the annihilation of the cotton manufacture of India, notwithstanding the advantage of having the cotton on the spot, free from all cost for carriage. As in Jamaica, and as in India, the land had been gradually exhausted by the exportation of its products in their rudest state, and the country had thus been drained of capital, a necessary consequence of which was that the labour even of men found no demand, while women and children starved, that the women and children of England might spin cotton and weave cloth that Ireland was too poor to purchase. Bad, however, as was all this, a worse state of things was at hand. Poverty and wretchedness compelled the wretched people to fly in thousands and tens of thousands across the Channel, thus following the capital and the soil that had been transferred to Birmingham and Manchester; and the streets and cellars of those towns, and those of London, Liverpool, and Glasgow, were filled with men, women, and children in a state almost of starvation; while throughout the country, men were offering to perform the farm labour for food alone, and a cry had arisen among the people of England that the labourers were likely to be swamped by these starving Irishmen: to provide against which it was needed that the landlords of Ireland should be compelled to support their own poor, and forthwith an act of Parliament was passed for that purpose. Thence arose, of course, an increased desire to rid the country of the men, women, and children whose labour could not be sold, and who could therefore pay no rent. The "Crowbar Brigade" was therefore called into more active service, as will be seen by the following account of their labours in a single one of the "Unions" established under the new poor-law system, which in many cases took the whole rent of the land for the maintenance of those who had been reduced to pauperism by the determination of the people of Manchester and Birmingham to continue the colonial system under which Ireland had been ruined.

"In Galway Union, recent accounts declared the number of poor evicted, and their homes levelled within the last two years, to equal the numbers in Kilrush—4000 families and 20,000 human beings are said to have been here also thrown upon the road, houseless and homeless. I can readily believe the statement, for to me some parts of the country appeared like an enormous graveyard—the numerous gables of the unroofed dwellings seemed to be gigantic tombstones. They were, indeed, records of decay and death far more melancholy than the grave can show. Looking on them, the doubt rose in my mind, am I in a civilized country? Have we really a free constitution? Can such scenes be paralleled in Siberia or Caffraria?"

A single case described in a paper recently published by Mr. Dickens in his "Household Words," will convey to the reader some idea of an eviction, that may be taken as a specimen, and perhaps a fair one, of the fifty thousand evictions that took place in the single year 1849, and of the hundreds of thousands that have taken place in the last six years.

"Black piles of peat stood on the solitary ground, ready after a summer's cutting and drying. Presently, patches of cultivation presented themselves; plots of ground raised on beds, each a few feet wide, with intervening trenches to carry off the boggy water, where potatoes had grown, and small fields where grew more ragwort than grass, enclosed by banks cast up and tipped here and there with a brier or a stone. It was the husbandry of misery and indigence. The ground had already been freshly manured by sea-weeds, but the village, where was it? Blotches of burnt-ground, scorched heaps of rubbish, and fragments of blackened walls, alone were visible. Garden plots were trodden down and their few bushes rent up, or hung with tatters of rags. The two horsemen, as they hurried by, with gloomy visages, uttered no more than the single word—EVICTION!"

The scenes that had taken place at the destruction of that village, are thus described to the author of the sad work, by a poor servant:—

"Oh, bless your honour! If you had seen that poor frantic woman when the back of the cabin fell and buried her infant, where she thought she had laid it safe for a moment while she flew to part her husband and a soldier who had struck the other children with the flat of his sword and bade them troop off. Oh, but your honour it was a killing sight! * * * I could not help thinking of the poor people at Rathbeg when the soldiers and police cried, 'Down with them! down with them even to the ground!'—and then the poor little cabins came down all in fire and smoke, amid the howls and cries of the poor creatures. Oh, it was a fearful sight, your honour—it was indeed—to see the poor women hugging their babies, and the houses where they were born burning in the wind. It was dreadful to see the old bed-ridden man lie on the ground among the few bits of furniture, and groan to his gracious God above! Oh, your honour, you never saw such a sight, or—you—sure a—it would never have been done."

This is certainly an awful picture of the slavery resulting from compelling a whole nation to devote itself to agriculture, and thus annihilating the power of association—from compelling a whole people to forego all the advantages resulting from proximity to market for the sale of their products or the purchase of manure—and from compelling men, women, and children to be idle, when they would desire to be employed. In reading it, we are forcibly reminded of the razzias of the little African kings, who, anxious for a fresh supply of slaves, collect their troops together and invade the neighbouring territories, where they enact scenes corresponding exactly with the one here described. In Africa, however, the slave is fed by those who have burned and destroyed his house and his farm; but in Ireland, as labour is valueless, he is turned into the roads or the grave-yards to die of famine, or of pestilence. And yet, even now, the Times asks the question—

"How are the people to be fed and employed? That is the question which still baffles an age that can transmit a message round the world in a moment of time, and point out the locality of a planet never yet seen. There is the question which founders both the bold and the wise."

Up to this time there had been repeated cases of partial famine, but now the nation was startled by the news of the almost total failure of the crop of potatoes, the single description of food upon which the people of Ireland had been reduced to depend. Constant cropping of the soil, returning to it none of the manure, because of the necessity for exporting almost the whole of its products, had produced disease in the vegetable world—precisely as the want of proper nourishment produces it in the animal world—and now a cry of famine rang throughout the land. The poor-houses were everywhere filled, while the roads, and the streets, and the grave-yards were occupied by the starving and the naked, the dying and the dead; and the presses of England were filled with denunciations of English and Irish landholders, who desired to make food dear, while men, women, and children were perishing by hundreds of thousands for want of food. Thus far, Ireland had been protected in the market of England, as some small compensation for the sacrifice she had made of her manufacturing interests; but now, small as has been the boon, it was to be withdrawn, precisely as we see to have been the case with the poor people of Jamaica. Like them, the Irish had become poor, and their trade had ceased to be of value, although but seventy years before they had been England's best customers. The system had exhausted all the foreign countries with which England had been permitted to maintain what is denominated free trade—India, Portugal, Turkey, the West Indies, and Ireland herself—and it had become necessary to make an effort to obtain markets in the only prosperous countries of the world, those which had to a greater or less extent placed the consumer by the side of the producer, to wit—this country, France, Belgium, Germany, and Russia—and the mode of accomplishing this was that of offering them the same freedom of trade in food by which Ireland had been ruined. The farmers were everywhere invited to exhaust their soil by sending its products to England to be consumed; and the corn-laws were repealed for the purpose of enabling them to impoverish themselves by entering into competition with the starving Irishman, who was thus at once deprived of the market of England, as by the Act of Union he had been deprived of his own. The cup of wretchedness was before well nigh full, but it was now filled. The price of food fell, and the labourer was ruined, for the whole product of his land would scarcely pay his rent. The landlord was ruined, for he could collect no rents, and he was at the same time liable for the payment of enormous taxes for the maintenance of his poor neighbours. His land was encumbered with mortgages and settlements, created when food was high, and he could pay no interest; and now a law was passed, by aid of which property could be summarily disposed of at public sale, and the proceeds distributed among those who had legal claims upon it. The landholder of Jamaica, exhausted by the system, had had his property taken from him at a price fixed by Parliament, and the proceeds applied to the discharge of debts incurred to his English agents, and now the same Parliament provided for the transfer of Irish property with a view to the payment of the same class of debts. The impoverished landholder now experienced the same fate that had befallen his poor tenant, and from that date to this, famine and pestilence, levellings and evictions, have been the order of the day. Their effect has everywhere been to drive the poor people from the land, and its consequences are seen in the fact that the population numbered, in 1850, one million six hundred and fifty-nine thousand less than it did in 1840; while the starving population of the towns had largely increased. The county of Cork had diminished 222,000, while Dublin had grown in numbers 22,000. Galway had lost 125,000, while the city had gained 7422. Connaught had lost 414,000, while Limerick and Belfast had gained 30,000. The number of inhabited houses had fallen from 1,328,000 to 1,047,000, or more than twenty per cent. Announcing these startling facts, the London Times stated that "for a whole generation man had been a drug in Ireland, and population a nuisance." The "inexhaustible Irish supply had," as it continued, "kept down the price of English labour," but this cheapness of labour had "contributed vastly to the improvement and power" of England, and largely to "the enjoyment of those who had money to spend." Now, however, a change appeared to be at hand, and it was to be feared that the prosperity of England, based as it had been on cheap Irish labour, might be interfered with, as famine and pestilence, evictions and emigration, were thinning out the Celts who had so long, as it is said, been "hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Saxon." Another of the advocates of the system which has exhausted and ruined Ireland, and is now transferring its land to the men who have enriched themselves by acting as middlemen between the producers and consumers of the world, rejoicing in the great number of those who had fled from their native soil to escape the horrors of starvation and pestilence, declares that this is to be regarded as the joyful side of the case. "What," it asks,

"Will follow? This great good, among others—that the stagnant weight of unemployed population in these insulated realms is never likely again to accumulate to the dangerous amount which there was sometimes cause to apprehend that, from unforeseen revulsions in industry or foreign trade, it might have done. A natural vent is now so thoroughly opened, and so certain to grow wider and clearer everyday, that the overflow will pass off whenever a moderate degree of pressure recurs. Population, skill, and capital, also, will no longer wait in consternation till they are half spent with watching and fear. The way is ready. They will silently shift their quarters when the competition or depression here becomes uncomfortable. Every family has already friends or acquaintances who have gone before them over sea. Socially, our insulation as a people is proved, by the census of 1851, to be at an end."—Daily News.

The Times, too, rejoices in the prospect that the resources of Ireland will now probably be developed, as the Saxon takes the place of the Celt, who has so long hewn the wood and drawn the water for his Saxon masters. "Prosperity and happiness may," as it thinks,

"Some day reign over that beautiful island. Its fertile soil, its rivers and lakes, its water-power, its minerals, and other materials for the wants and luxuries of man, may one day be developed; but all appearances are against the belief that this will ever happen in the days of the Celt. That tribe will soon fulfil the great law of Providence which seems to enjoin and reward the union of races. It will mix with the Anglo-American, and be known no more as a jealous and separate people. Its present place will be occupied by the more mixed, more docile, and more serviceable race, which has long borne the yoke of sturdy industry in this island, which can submit to a master and obey the law. This is no longer a dream, for it is a fact now in progress, and every day more apparent."

Commenting upon the view thus presented, an American journalist most truly says—

"There is a cold-blooded atrocity in the spirit of these remarks for which examples will be sought in vain, except among the doctors of the free-trade school. Naturalists have learned to look with philosophical indifference upon the agonies of a rabbit or a mouse expiring in an exhausted receiver, but it requires long teaching from the economists before men's hearts can be so steeled, that after pumping out all the sustenance of vitality from one of the fairest islands under the sun, they can discourse calmly upon its depopulation as proof of the success of the experiment, can talk with bitter irony of 'that strange region of the earth where such a people, affectionate and hopeful, genial and witty, industrious and independent, was produced and could not stay,' and can gloat in the anticipation that prosperity and happiness may some day reign over that beautiful island, and its boundless resources for the wants and luxuries of man be developed, not for the Celt, but 'for a more mixed, more docile, and more serviceable race, which can submit to a master and obey the law.'"—Albany Journal.