England. Further borrowing, however, will soon become impossible at present rates. Investors must soon appreciate the real state of affairs-the sooner the better for India. The debt in 1878 was over £127,000,000, putting aside the guaranteed railways; and still we borrow on.*

National bankruptcy is a very ugly phrase, but it surely rests with those who impose extra taxation in a famine year to show that the fast increasing uneasiness is unfounded, and that their own figures, which show how near the final collapse of the Indian finances under present management must really be, are utterly fallacious. During the twenty years also we had perfect peace. How long may that continue? Yet even with this profound peace sixteen out of the twenty years have been years of deficit, and in the meantime Imperial and local taxation has been doubled.

I can only repeat

It is needless to go further. that the natives of India are growing poorer and poorer; that taxation is not only actually but relatively far heavier; that each successive scarcity widens the area of impoverishment, and renders famines more frequent; that most of the trade is but an index to the poverty and crushing overtaxation of the people; that a highly-organised foreign rule constitutes by itself a most terrible drain

* "We are an alien power ruling at an enormous disadvantage, principally by force of character and administrative skill. As long as the natives of Hindustan believe that whatever power might follow us, native or European, will tax them more heavily than we do, we are safe. Should the other feeling prevail, we shall lose our hold on the country."-HUNTER'S "Life of Lord Mayo," vol. ii., p. 286.

upon the country; and that all the railways and irrigation works on the planet, if concentrated in India at the cost of the peasantry, would but serve to hasten the inevitable catastrophe. The remedies are at hand, but it will take us five-and-twenty years at least of continuous and unremitting statesmanship to repair the blunders we have committed. Reduced expenditure on the army, suspension of public works, the steady substitution of natives for Europeans in the government and administration, a really light permanent settlement in every part of India, and lowering of taxation of every description, at any rate for the present-these are a few of the steps which have become absolutely essential.

From the narrowest view of self-interest this is to our advantage. All agree that, so long as the agricultural class is well affected to us, they will fight on our side, and we can easily maintain our rule; but let them become discontented, as they are becoming discontented now, and no man can tell what it would cost us in men and money to hold the country. country. To say that this or that reform cannot be carried out, means simply that we prefer to postpone the day of reckoning, which will be all the more terrible for India and for us when it comes.

Furthermore, the ryots of India would be our best customers if only we would leave the most thrifty, patient, hard-working peasantry in the world the means to improve their own condition. Their demand now for our manufactured goods is at the outside 2s. 6d. a head, though, to secure this, we have displaced nearly all the native industries. A demand of even 1 a head for English goods would

still be trifling by the side of that of the population of our great free-governed colonies, but would secure us here alone an active export of £190,000,000 a year. There would be no need to grumble about fresh markets then. Our best markets are with our own people, and their continuous impoverishment must tell even on their present insignificant purchases. Already we seem to have reached the extreme limit of their buying capacity, and the only encouraging feature for India is that she seems. once more on the road to supplying her own, or a portion of her own necessities. On the grounds, therefore, both of national security and national wealth, the present extravagant and dangerous, though doubtless thoroughly well-meaning, policy must be abandoned.

Here, if anywhere, it behoves us to rise to the level of our vast responsibilities. This matter of the impoverishment and decay of India is no affair of this party or of that, of regard for one man or for the other. It is a question which deeply concerns every Englishman among us, and can only be adequately handled by the strenuous exertions of all. The situation in India is one which must be dealt with immediately, and yet upon sound principles which will stand the test of years. Continuity of statesmanship,—statesmanship of the highest order, which grasps details, but can surely apply great principles,—this, if ever, is called for at this most critical juncture. The widest publicity, the most implicit confidence in the people, would but serve to strengthen the hands of the Minister who attempted courageously to discharge

so honourable a duty; for it is in seasons of real difficulty and danger that his countrymen have always shown the highest capacity, and have most earnestly supported those who strive to avert the disasters which may threaten the community.

II.

CONTROVERSY.

We have thus seen that if a large amount of official evidence and the testimony of facts and figures are deserving of credit, the people of India, as a whole, are getting poorer and poorer under our administration. Our public works, on which such enormous sums of money were expended, have been, and even still are, carried on at a dead loss to the population; and the unfortunate tax-payers are too frequently forced to borrow at usurious rates to pay the interest which the Government has guaranteed on these unprofitable investments. This by itself is a very serious matter where the bulk of the people are so miserably poor.

Famines have proved conclusively that the gravest poverty exists in almost every district. During the twenty years dealt with they were very numerous, and the plan which is now adopted, of making the poorer classes of one province pay to keep alive the mass of the famine-stricken people in another, this process being reversed when the former suffer in turn, cannot fail in the end to bring about a terrible catastrophe. For, as For, as has already been shown, the soil of India is undergoing steady deterio