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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 38

Postscript, April 17Th

Postscript, April 17Th.

The Fortnightly Review for the current mouth furnishes a paper from Sir George Campbell, one of the highest Indian financial authorities, in which it is clearly shown, first, that the public expenditure has increased, still increases, and must continue so to do; and second, that trivial as is the rental derivable from a territory four-fifths as large and as populous as Europe, the government cannot, dare not, add to it. Why it is that such is the case is clearly shown in an article just now given in the Contemporary Review, from which we learn that throughout the Bombay Presidency lands are being everywhere abandoned because of inability on the part of the wretched cultivator to meet the demand for his share of the paltry amount of revenue that can be gathered. In the single province of Guzerat, justly styreu the "Garden of India," little less than 8000 such cases, comprising more than 25,000 acres, occurred in the single year 1873; and this example seems to present a fair specimen of all Western India. Look where we may, there or elsewhere, we find evidence that in the absence of that domestic commerce which results from diversification of employments there can be no real agriculture; and, that in the absence of a healthful agricultural population, there can be no steadiness of government. That of India even now totters to its fall, and for the simple reason that the British free-trade policy has been steadily removing the foundation on which it had been built.