THE AGRICULTURAL DANGER I believe it to be an axiom in politics that all social convulsions have been preceded by a period of growing misery for the agricultural poor, combined with the growing intelligence of the urban populations. Certainly this was the case in Europe at the time of the Reformation, and again, following the lead of France, in the last century; and, most certainly and immediately under our own observation, it has been the case in Ireland and in Egypt at the present day. Where there is complete ignorance, misery may be accumulated almost without limit by a despotic power. Where the mass of the population is prosperous, no growth of knowledge need be feared. But it is at the point where education and starvation meet that the flame breaks forth. This is a truism. Yet there are few who recognize how absolutely true it is of India. No one accustomed to Eastern travel can fail to see how poor the Indian peasant is. Travelling by either of the great lines of railway which bisect the Continent, one need hardly leave one’s carriage to be aware of this. From Madras to Bombay, and from Bombay again to the Ganges valley, distances by rail of seven hundred and eight hundred miles, one passes not half a dozen towns, nor a single village which has a prosperous look. The fields, considering the general lightness of the soil, are not ill-cultivated; but there is much waste land; and in the scattered villages there is an entire absence of well-built houses, enclosed gardens, or large groves of fruit trees, the signs of individual wealth which Nor is the aspect of poverty less startling if one looks closer. Entering a Deccan In every village which I visited of the British Deccan I heard complaints of poverty resembling most closely those to which I was accustomed in Syria and Egypt—complaints of over-taxation of the country, of increase and inequalities of assessment, The special evils which we have imposed upon him are, however, only too apparent. In former days, though his land assessment or rent was very likely as high as now, it was mitigated for him by custom and by certain privileges which our system of administration has deprived him of. In bad seasons when his crop was poor he enjoyed remissions which are very seldom granted now. The lord of the land to whom he paid his rent lived within reach of him, and in days of distress might be cajoled into pity or possibly frightened into moderation. But the landlord now is a formless thing—the Government—which no tears can reach, no menace turn away. It is represented only by a succession of changing agents, strangers to the country, ignorant of the people and their wants, and whose names the ryots rarely learn to know. This is a constant complaint in their mouths, and the condition of British India under the modern system is a striking instance of the evils of absentee ownership. For the last hundred years it has been the constant aim of the Madras Government to destroy all ownership in land but its own, and it has so far succeeded that it With regard to the actual amount of the assessment, I made what inquiries I was able, endeavouring, so far as possible, to ascertain what proportion it bore to the gross value of the crop, and, although I state it with all due diffidence, I think I am not wrong in putting it at 35 to 40 per cent. for the Deccan district. It may well be considerably more, but I think it can hardly be less. In any case, I feel quite certain that Dr. Hunter’s figures in his book (which, be it remembered, is the accepted handbook about India) are enormously wrong, where, quoting the Famine Commission, he states that “the land tax throughout British India is from 3 per cent. to 7 per cent. on the gross out-turn.” Seven per cent. would of course be a very light rent in any country, but 40 per cent. would be inordinately high, and I am quite sure that impartial inquiry would prove that, in the Deccan at least, my own figures are far more nearly correct. In Bengal, I know there are lands assessed as low as 1 per cent.; but Bengal is a prosperous country, nearly the only one in British India, and is precisely the exception which best proves the general rule by exemplifying the causes of agricultural poverty. It is, however, not merely the amount of the assessment which weighs upon these Deccan ryots, nor merely the inelasticity of its collection. If the natives themselves are to be believed, there are other causes of poverty directly due to the British connection which have had a far more disastrous effect upon the prosperity of the country than any The official account is different. According to apologists of the Strachey school, over-population caused by the security of our rule is the sufficient reason of all distress, and it is possible that this may be correct of Bengal and other districts enjoying more prosperous conditions than those of which I am now speaking. But as applied to the Deccan it Other modern grievances of the peasant are, first, the new Forest Laws. These were introduced some years ago in consequence of the growing famines which, it was argued, were caused by the irregularity of the monsoon rains, which in their turn were caused by the denudation of the forests. Admitting as true all that can be said of the necessity of strong measures to prevent destruction in these, and to increase the area of vegetation, the modus operandi seems to have been needlessly violent, and most injurious to the people. One would have supposed that so wide an object as the regulation of the rainfall would have been provided for out of Imperial funds. But this was only done in part. The bulk of the loss fell on individual peasants. Wherever I went in the Madras and Bombay presidencies I heard of common lands enclosed and rights of pasture withdrawn, and this without any compensation Allied to this, and even more general in its pressure on the poor, stands, secondly, the Salt tax. Its oppressive character has been much disputed; but in the Madras Deccan and the poorer districts of Bombay there should be no doubt whatever upon the matter. It is the one great theme of complaint, the one that touches the people most nearly and is most injurious in proportion to the poverty of the sufferer by it. The comparatively well-to-do ryot of Bengal and North-Western India does not feel it and does Lastly, and this is the case all over British India, the peasantry is deeply, hopelessly in debt. It is curious to find this prime cause of the Egyptian Revolution faithfully reproduced in India under our But with European administration came other doctrines. Wealth, our economists affirmed, must not be idle; production must be increased; resources must be developed; capital must be thrown into the land. The revenue, above all things, must be made regular and secure. In order to effect this, payment in money was substituted for payment in kind, a regular tax for an irregular portion of the crop;—and, while the rate was nominally lowered, no loss from accidental circumstances was to be The change, however, put immediate wealth into the hands of Government, by lessening the cost of collecting the revenue, and so was approved as a beneficial one; and by an inevitable process of financial reasoning borrowing was encouraged. It was argued that capital, if thrown into the land, would increase the wealth of the agriculturist along with the wealth of the revenue. But how induce the investment of that capital except by increasing its security? In order to enable the agriculturist to borrow, he must be able to give his debtor something of more value than the crop in his field. Then why not the field itself? The laws of mortgage and recovery of debt by safe and easy process were consequently introduced, and courts appointed for the protection of creditors. This completed the peasant’s ruin. Finding money suddenly at his disposal, he borrowed without scruple, not only to pay taxes and to improve his land, but also for his This is the last worst evil which English administration has brought upon the Indian peasantry, and when one considers all their poverty and the depth of their increasing liabilities one finds it difficult to have patience with the optimist views of men like Sir John Strachey, who see all that they have created in India and find it very good. That we have done much that is of advantage to agricultural India no one will deny, but have we not done it still more harm? We have given the ryot security from death by violence, but we have probably increased his danger of death by starvation. This is a doubt which is beginning to assert itself vividly in the minds of thoughtful Indians, and it is one that Englishmen too will do well, before it is too late, to entertain. Admitting, then, the general fact of India’s growing agricultural poverty, what should be our remedy? I confess to being a little sceptical of the legislative nostrums partially applied and proposed to be applied by the Imperial Government to a patient manifestly in want of a complete change of treatment and a long period of financial rest. Nor do I see my way to accepting such alleviations as the Bengal Rent Bill, or the founding of agricultural banks, or even local self-government, though all these things may be good, as a sufficient check to the evils fast accumulating. At best they may succeed in shifting the burdens of the people a little on this When I was at Calcutta, I constantly discussed this matter with the leading native economists, and I know, too, their ideas in other cities; and at Bombay it formed the chief subject of attention at the meeting specially convened to instruct me with regard to the wants of the Presidency. I know, therefore, what Indians think about Indian finance, and I believe their reasoning is sound. According to these, the vice of the Calcutta budgets lies in the fact that, whereas in every other country the finance Minister looks solely to the interests of the country he serves, in India he looks principally to the interests, not of India, but of England. Two English interests have to be served first, before any attention can be paid to the necessities of those who supply the revenue. First, the Anglo-Indian Administration must be maintained in full employment, in pay, allowances, and according to native ideas in luxuries; and secondly, every kind of advantage must be given to English trade. It is unnecessary for me to argue out the question of the excessive costliness of the civil and military establishments of India. These are notorious in the world as surpassing It is a perpetual astonishment to travellers to note the scale of living of every Englishman employed in India, in however mean a capacity. The enormous palaces of governors and lieutenant-governors, their country houses, their residences in the hills, their banquets and entertainments, their retinues of servants, their carriages and horses, their special trains on their journeyings, their tents, their armies of retainers and camp followers—these are only samples of the universal profusion; an equally noble hospitality reigns in every bungalow on the plains; and endless dinners of imported delicacies, with libations of imported wines, tempt night after night the inhabitants of the most solitary stations to forget the dismal fact that they are in Asia and far from their own land. No Collector’s wife will wear an article of Indian manufacture to save her soul from perdition, and all her furniture, even to her carpets, must be of English make. I remember early in my travels having the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality of a country station-master on the Indian Peninsular Railway, and being astonished to find him living in better style, and in a house larger than most English rectories, while we were driven out after luncheon by his lady in a charming phaeton drawn by a pair of stepping ponies. There was no reason, however, for astonishment. He lived as all Englishmen in India do, that is to say, about five times as well as in his rank of life he possibly could do at home, and he was worthy of his good fortune. Only it must not be supposed that I say, a traveller cannot fail to be impressed, and, if he have any powers of reflection, disagreeably so, with this profusion. There is surely no country in the world where in the midst of such starvation there is so much waste; certainly none where the expense of it all is borne so wholly and directly by the poor. I wonder whether any one has calculated the number of miles of macadamized road in the various Anglo-Indian cantonments, not a yard of which has ever served any purpose beyond that of enabling the officers’ wives to pay each other visits in their carriages? I wonder whether any one has calculated the numbers of absolutely useless clock towers and Gothic memorials erected by Sir Richard Temples to Sir Bartle Freres, and Sir Bartle Freres to Sir Richard Temples in the various Presidencies? I wonder whether any one has calculated how many hogsheads of champagne the water-drinking ryot has paid for in the last half-century as an unaccounted item of his yearly budget? These things strike the imagination of the traveller. They do not strike the resident in India. They are not arguments, but impressions; and yet they mean something. If, however, the ryot must maintain the luxury of his English administrators before his own wants can be supplied, so, too, must he maintain the English trader to the ruin of his own trade. I am repeating native arguments when I complain that the necessity of considering the advantage of Manchester capitalists They say, moreover, that Free Trade in manufactured goods has destroyed the native industries and given nothing in their stead. When the hand-looms a hundred years ago were ruined in the English counties, the rural population migrated to the towns and found work in the great factories. But in India this has hardly at all happened. The ryot who used to weave is left without labour of any sort I was surprised to find, in an assemblage mainly of rich men, that most of those who composed the Bombay meeting already alluded to were in favour of some form of income tax. Not that they altogether denied its general unpopularity, but from the necessity they recognized of taxing wealth. They said that in one shape or other incomes had always till recently been taxed in India, and that, though there were great difficulties in the way of collecting any The prime measure, however, of agricultural reform, on which all native India seems agreed, is the granting of a permanent revenue settlement to every province, such as was ninety years ago granted to Bengal, and limiting thereby the preposterous claim of the Government to all ownership in land. This right of State ownership has worked everywhere, or nearly everywhere, its full natural result of impoverishment and disaffection; and Bengal, which has been exempted from its action, has alone remained prosperous. I do not propose to argue out this great question here. But I intend to return to it on a future occasion; and it will be sufficient for me now to say, that the value placed by native To sum up, Indian economists are in favour, first, of import duties on manufactured goods such as are imposed in Australia and other colonies; secondly, of a shifting of the financial burden as far as possible from the agricultural poor to the commercial rich; and thirdly, of a renunciation by the Government of its indefinite claims upon the land. These views will probably be considered preposterous in England, where we have cut-and-dried principles of economy in contradiction to them. But it is certain that all native opinion is against us, and that our present system is bringing India very near to ruin. Surely, there must be something wrong in a state of things which has produced the spectacle of a Government, after having absorbed to itself the whole land rent of a country, still finding itself constantly in financial shifts. The Government of India, as landlord, does practically nothing for the land. All is squandered and spent on other things; and the people who till the soil are yearly becoming poorer and more hopeless. Note.—Since this was published, in 1884, some reduction, as already stated, has been made in the iniquitous salt tax; but most of the other economic evils still prevail, some of them in an exaggerated form. No attempt has been made, by the imposition of import duties, to re-create the lost native industries, nor has any permanent settlement of the land revenue been granted, notwithstanding the example of its astonishing success in restoring agricultural prosperity under very similar conditions in Egypt. Famines continue to be attributed by Viceroy after Viceroy, not to their true economic causes, but to the “act of God” in withholding the rain, which in spite of the forest laws is still in periodical default. Imperial expenditure has not been lessened, nor has the burden of personal debt on the ryot’s back been relieved. He is still the rack-rented tenant of an absentee state-landlord throughout the greater part of British India. |