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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 38

Letter Sixth

Letter Sixth.

"In the time of its native princes," says Mr. Campbell in his "Modern India," India was a "paying country," and that such was the fact is absolutely certain. Their number was great and their mode of living luxurious beyond anything then known in Europe;, but their people, profitably employed, were probably in the enjoyment of an amount of comfort fully equal to what could have been then exhibited by any of the communities of the West. Now, however, when that great country has for more than a century, Mr. Editor, been subjected to an exclusive British control, we find a picture widely different; the princesand their, magnificence having disappeared, and their palaces being occupied by mere clerks chiefly employed in gathering up the proceeds of a most oppressive taxation to be thence transmitted to that "city of palaces," Calcutta, where sits enthroned a representative of Her Majesty the Queen and Empress seriously engaged in contemplation of the unpleasant fact, that if he would avoid public bankruptcy he must still further misuse the power to poison and demoralize the hundreds of millions of Chinese people to whom he stands even now indebted for almost a fourth of the revenue he controls, the actual amount thence derived being in the close neighborhood of $50,000,000. The change thus exhibited is the saddest that history anywhere records. To what has it been due? Let us see!

Local action, local combination, local expenditure of the proceeds, of taxation, domestic commerce, exhibit themselves conspicuously throughout Indian history down to the commencement of the present century. If the cultivator contributed too large a portion of his grain, it was at least consumed in a neighboring market, and nothing went from off the land. Manufactures, too, were widely spread, and thus was made demand for the labor not required in agriculture. "On the coast of Coromandel," said Orme, * "and in page 25 the province of Bengal, when at some distance from a high road or principal town, it is difficult to find a village in which every man, woman, and child is not employed in making a piece of cloth. At present," he continues, "much the greatest part of whole provinces are employed in this single manufacture." Its progress, as he said, included "no less than a description of the lives, of half the inhabitants of Hindostan."

While employment was thus locally subdivided and neighbor was thus enabled to exchange with neighbor, exchanges between the producers of food, or of salt, in one part of the country, and the producers of cotton and manufacturers of cloth in others, tended to the production of commerce with more distant men—whether within, or without, the limits of India itself. Bengal was celebrated for the finest muslins, the consumption of which at Delhi, and in Northern India generally, was large; the Coromandel coast being equally celebrated for the best chintzes and calicoes—leaving to Western India the manufacture of strong and inferior goods of every kind. Under these circumstances, it is no matter of surprise that the country was rich, and that its people, though often overtaxed, and sometimes plundered by invading armies, were prosperous in a high degree.

The foundation having thus been laid in a great domestic commerce, that with the world at large was great; so great that exchange was then in favor of India with all the nations of the earth. Watt and Arkwright had then however, given to Britain those means of underworking the world which have been since so unscrupulously used; and the monopoly thereof had been established by means of prohibition of the export not only of machinery itself, but of all the artisans by whom machines might possibly be made. To this was now, 1813, added the imposition of heavy duties on the import of India cottons, coupled with a prohibition of duties of any kind on English cottons imported into India. We have thus presented to us a course of proceeding the "folly and iniquity" of which are without, precedent in the world's history; yet was it carried into so full effect that when Bishop Heber, a dozen or more years later, had occasion to visit the site of that great city of Dacca, which had been accustomed to supply the courts of Asia and of Europe with tissues so delicate as to be likened to "woven air," he found it a mass of jungle given up to the tiger and the elephant; as in fact Was more or less the case with all other of the manufacturing cities of what had till recently been regarded as greatest of the empires of the world. As a consequence of' this unhappy state of affairs, there went up soon after to the Sovereign, the Parliament, and the people of Britain, a memorial so sad as worthy to be placed now side by side with that of Prince Kung and his fellow councillors; it's simple prayer being that, as British subjects, they might be placed on equal footing with other Britons, paying duties as they paid, neither more nor less. Then, as now, however, they appealed to hearts of stone—traders' hearts—their modest prayer receiving no attention whatsoever, and the work of annihilation going steadily page 26 forward until the cotton manufacture had disappeared throughout all that great region of country extending from "Bombay to Bokhara, from Smyrna to Samarcand," with "a ruin," said Sir Robert Peel, "without parallel in the annals of commerce."

The demand for labor now so far disappeared that Mr. Chapman in his "Commerce and Cotton in India," an ardent admirer of the system to which that effect had been due, was led, some five and twenty years since, to speak to his British fellow citizens in the words that follow:—

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

With the decline thus exhibited in the domestic commerce there came, of course, increase of difficulty in obtaining the means required for carrying on the government; and, as necessary consequence, a taxation so searching as to embrace not only all the instruments required for household uses, but also those, however small and insignificant, required for any purpose of manufacture; the land tax, meanwhile, being so increased as, according to your fellow-country-man Mr. John Bright, to take from the wretched laborer front 70 to 80 per cent, of the yield of land subjected to a cultivation of the most exhaustive kind. Add to this a rate of interest that for these miserable people ranged between 30 and 60 per cent, per annum, and you will, as I think, see, Mr. Editor, that the causes of the rebellion of '57 lay somewhat deeper than in the requirement of the government that sepoys should bite off cartridge ends that had been dipped in grease. Had there existed no better reason than this the close of that rebellion would not have been marked by those cold-blooded murders by which it now stands so much distinguished. Of all men there are none so bitter as the disappointed trader, and the Indian government had thus far been simply a representation of that "nation of shopkeepers" whose advent upon the stage was so greatly deprecated by Adam Smith.

With the close of that rebellion we reach the termination of the existence of the East India Company as a territorial power, and the commencement of that British Indian empire of which her majesty the queen is hereafter to be styled the empress. From that time forward the people of India were, as might have been supposed, to be regarded as fellow subjects with the men of Britain, liable to performance of the same duties, and equally entitled to claim respect for rights. Eighteen years having now already passed since such change in their political condition had been made, we may page 27 here inquire into the changes in their material and moral condition that have been brought about, as follows:—

The territory of the empire equals that of all Europe, Russia excepted; and its population now numbers two hundred and forty millions, being more than that of all Europe, like exception being made. Of this vast area a large proportion, probably half, belongs to the State as land proprietor, the revenue thence resulting being the rent that throughout Europe accrues to the proprietor subject to claims of the State in the form of tax. That rent now but little exceeds $100,000,000, giving an average of twenty cents per acre from 500,000,000 acres; and yet the charge, as has been shown, frequently much exceeds fifty per cent of the gross produce, and rarely falls below it. What, under such circumstances, is the condition of the poor agriculturist? What can be his power to contribute to the commerce of the world by making demand for the products of other lands I leave it to you. Mr. Editor, to determine.

Unable to obtain further contributions from the land, the government finds itself perpetually in need, and hence it has been that a writer in one of your public journals, some four years since, felt himself warranted in thus furnishing description of the movement:—

"In the last ten years the salt tax, already most oppressive, has been five times increased; a heavy income tax has been imposed, and taxes on feasts and marriages have been proposed; two and a quarter millions of people have died of famine; the debt, including guarantees of badly constructed and expensive railroads, has grown to nearly $500,000,000, the sole reliance for payment of Interest thereon being now found in the continued maintenance of the power to poison the Chinese people with the produce of Indian opium fields."

Salt being a prime necessity of life, and the income derived from its consumption being in the neighborhood of $30,000,000, or almost a third of that derived from the land, I have now to ask your attention to the tax thereon, and its effects, as follows:—

To a great extent the manufacture is a monopoly in the hands of government, requiring for its maintenance, as we are told, an army of thirteen thousand men. What additional supplies are required might readily be obtained from provinces on the coast, and mainly from Orissa; but, as if to prevent development of such industry, the salt there produced is, on free trade principles, equally taxed with that brought from England as ballast for ships coming to load with rice, jute, cotton, and other rude products, and paying, probably, as freight less than would be required for carriage of the home product to the markets of the provinces north and east of the Hoogly. As a consequence, these latter are so well supplied with foreign salt that, at times, the domestic manufacture is entirely suspended; poor people who see it then wasting almost at their doors being required to pay for what they need at so high a price that the fish in which their rivers so much abound is merely dried in the sun to be thereafter eaten in a half putrid state. The cost of manufacture is 16 cents per cwt. The tax is 104 cents, and it is said, therefore, to be not unusual to give for a pound of salt no loss than nine pounds of rice; thus reversing the order of things here page 28 observed, where the protected salt manufacturer is accustomed to give several pounds of salt for a pound of flour.

The combined revenue derived from salt, one of the most pressing needs of India, and from opium, the great enemy of China, varies little from $76,000,000; or three-fourths as much as the rents derivable from a territory more extensive than France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined, occupied by a people who would gladly work were they allowed so to do. Why is this? For the reason that every step taken by the government has tended to the suppression of that domestic commerce in whose absence there can arrive no such thing as a real agriculture. It may be said, however, that railroads have been constructed, and that public aid had been given in that direction. When, however, you, Mr. Editor, shall have carefully studied the facts, you will see that these are merely intended as aids to the foreign trade, enabling cotton to reach the ports on the way to Manchester, and British goods to make their way more readily to the interior, to the further destruction of the little domestic commerce that yet remains.

What now, under this admirable "free trade" system, has become the contribution of this vast country and its amiable and well-disposed people to the great commerce of the world? Of cotton received last year in Britain, to be there spun and woven and then to be returned to India, the quantity was 251,000,000 pounds, the equivalent of little more than half a million of American bales. Outside of cotton and of the opium forced upon China, the total annual export, consisting of rice, jute, tea, coffee, and other rude products of the soil, scarcely exceeds $120,000,000, or fifty cents per head of the total population. Such is the grand result at which we have arrived at the close of a period of nearly twenty years, throughout the whole of which the road to a great international commerce for a grand Indian empire was, as the world has been assured, to be found in the direction indicated by the British free-trade system!

What now, Mr. Editor, becomes of the revenues thus extorted from the poor salt consumers of India, the degraded opium consumers of China, and the wretched laborers on the land of India? For answer to this question, I present an extract from Mr. Torrens's recent work, "Empire in Asia," which reads as follows:—

"Nineteen-twentieths of our taxes are annually, monthly, it might almost be said' daily, respent among us; while of the revenues of India a large portion is exported hither to furnish us with extra means of comfort and of luxury. The manure is thus continually withdrawn from Eastern fields to enrich the island gardens of the West'. It has been Variously estimated that; irrespective of interest on debt, six, seven, and even eight million a year are drawn from India, to be spent by English-men either there or at home. The process of exhaustion may be slow, but it is sure. .... We have laid the people and princes of India under tribute, and after a century of varied experiments, the only limit of exaction seems to be the physical capacity of the yield"

Why the yield is so very light, may readily be understood by those who study on the 'shores of the great Indian rivers, and especially on those of the Mahanadi as shown in Hunter's "Orissa," the waste of animal food; the waste of vegetable food in the Pun- page 29 jaub and other provinces of the North; the waste of life from frequent and destructive famines; the universal waste of labor consequent upon an absence of demand therefor; and then look to the fact that all this poverty and waste are consequent upon the pursuit of a policy which imposes upon these poor people a necessity for sending the cotton crop tens of thousands of miles in search of the little spindle by aid of which it is made to undergo the first and simplest process of manufacture; to wit, its conversion into yarn. Under such circumstances need we wonder at the poverty which enforces continuance of the infamous opium traffic?

Sir Thomas Munro, than whom there is no higher authority, thus described, half a century since, the people of this great country:—

"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 ail, if a scrupulous respect and delicacy towards the female sex, are among the points that denote a civilized people, then the Hindoos are not inferior in civilization to the people of Europe."

Recently Mr. Torrens has described the barbarians of India, the treatment of whoso descendants at the hands of British travellers and traders has been so well exhibited by Lord Elgin, in the words that follow:—

"The governments of Southern Asia, when we began to meddle in their affairs, were strangers to the system of penal laws, which were then among the cherished institutions of our own and nearly every other European State. While no Catholic in Ireland could inherit freehold, command a regiment, or sit on the judicial bench; while in France the Huguenot weaver was driven into exile beyond sea; and while in Sweden none but Lutherans could sit as jurors; and in Spain no heretie was permitted Christian burial—Sunis and Sheahs, Mahrattas and Sikhs, competed freely for distinction and profit in almost every city and camp of Hindustan. The tide of war ebbed and flowed as in Christian lands, leaving its desolating traces more or less deeply marked upon village homesteads or dilapidated towers. But mosque and temple stood unscathed where they had stood before, monuments of architectural taste and piety, unsurpassed for beauty and richness of decoration in any country of the world." ... "Though the supreme governments were nominally absolute, there existed in the chieftains, priesthood, courts of justice, the municipal system, and above all, in the tenant-right to land, numerous and powerful barriers in the way of its abuse." . . . "Property was as carefully protected by the laws as in Europe, and their infringement sometimes cost a prince his throne Or life."

It is the hundred millions of an admirable people thus described that have been so sacrificed at the Manchester altar as to have produced a need for three wars having for their sole object, the raising of revenue by means that are rapidly bringing about a demoralization of the hundreds of millions of Chinese people. May I not be permitted to object to this, leaving you, Mr. Editor, to determine on which side lie the "folly and iniquity" that have been charged?

May I not be permitted to ask you if the "free trade" proceedings of the last twenty years have tended to promote the growth of commerce; to increase the admiration of poor Hindoos for the teachings of the Christian church; or to advance the cause of civilization?

Respectfully soliciting a reply to these questions, I am,

Yours respectfully,

H. C. Carey.

* Historical Fragments, London, 1805, p. 400.