disgraceful disrepair, the great tanks and waterways for irrigation purposes, carried out by these same native chiefs. Much boast is made of what is being done by the British in the way of irrigation; hitherto, beyond a number of great dams and canals, some of them marvels of engineering skill, the most that has been done has been to repair and improve the works which were there hundreds, probably thousands, of years before the conquering white man set foot on Indian soil. I have no wish to minimise all that has been and is still being done by the British Raj to introduce a settled form of government in India, but we must not overlook the fact that there is another side to the picture, and that the main concern of the rulers of India is not the improvement of the condition of the people, but the increase of the sources from which revenue can be drawn.

In saying this I am not imputing evil motives to the men who rule India, but simply stating a fact which, in my mind, admits of no dispute.

I conclude, then, that there is abundant evidence to justify the belief that the condition of the Indian peasant has worsened under British rule. The environment which for centuries had protected him has been shattered, and as a consequence he is less able to protect himself and his interests. New and strange conditions of life and government, in the control and direction of which he has no longer part or lot, have been forced upon him. He finds his poverty deepening and the burden of life pressing with increasing weight upon him, and not

only is he without means of resistance, but he has no organ through which he can voice his woes. One answer to this is to quote the estimates of people killed by internecine warfare in the days of pre-British rule; but to this the retort has been made that all the wars of the world since the Fall of man have not destroyed so many lives as famine has done in India during the past half-century.

Plague then is, in the main, due to hunger, and that is a condition of things for which our system of governing India must be held directly responsible.

BRITAIN AS ABSENTEE LANDLORD.

For further proof of my contention that the lot of the peasant has worsened under British rule, let us consider his present condition. His rent is a fixed quantity, payable in coin, not in kind, whether the crop be good or bad. In wet lands, i.e., irrigated lands, if there is no water and no crop no rent is charged, but if there is a one-anna crop—and a twelve-anna crop is reckoned the average, sixteen annas being a pukka or bumper crop the rent to the Government must be paid in full. For the past ten years only three have been average years, all the rest being under. As the rent or revenue, as it is called, is fixed on the assumption that the yield will average twelve annas (that is, twelve annas to the rupee) a year, it requires no great stretch of imagination to see what this means to the peasants, who, even at the best of times, are always at close grips with poverty, with hunger only one degree, and not always that, removed from them.

When the peasant wants fuel he has to go to the Government depôt and buy it, or obtain a licence, on payment of a fee, of course, to go and cut it, even when the trees grow on his own land!

Before he can catch a few fish for his own and his children's supper he must take out a licence. The pasture land on which his cattle formerly grazed is now being enclosed as forest, and he has often to go long distances to find pasturage, and then has to pay. If one of his beasts should stray within the unfenced area of the forest it is liable to be impounded and he himself fined. Wild pigs and other animals may root up and otherwise destroy his crops, but he is not allowed to carry a gun to frighten them away. He is usually up to the neck in debt to the money lender, who claims a lien upon the crop ere it is reaped, the railway system giving facilities for having it carried to market. Thus the binns in which the surplus grains were formerly stored now stand empty or have totally disappeared. If his irrigation system is out of order, he is bandied about from one official to another to find out who is responsible, since, incredible as it may seem, in almost every department there are several sets of officials, each acting independently of the other.

As already indicated, the subordinates of each of these departments require to be bought off, and woe betide the luckless tenant who fails to stump up properly. If the ryot wishes to see an official he has often to walk miles to the nearest district office, wait there for hours, and then probably learn that he has gone to the wrong place. He will often spend days in this fashion, and only too often all to no purpose.

The Indian peasant is often sneered at as being unprogressive and shiftless. But what incentive

has he to be diligent and active? Strive as he may, he realises that in the end the Sircar's kist will swallow up everything, and as he feels the weight of one impost after another weighing him down, and one restriction after another hemming him in, little wonder that his inherited fatalism comes to his aid, and he lets things drift, feeling it to be helpless to try to do battle against the tide which is carrying him forward towards the abyss.

As with the peasants, so, too, with the landlords where these exist. They are made to feel in a score of ways that their presence is an offence to a Government which exists for the "protection of the people," and so they are subjected to all sorts of imposts and restraints. They are forced to give terms and conditions to their tenants which the Government steadily refuses to those ryots who hold land direct from itself. Government officials tell of the exactions which the zemindars take from the ryots, and how but for the intervention of the Government they would make the lot of the peasant unendurable; and yet, strange as it may appear, I did not meet a single case of a cultivating ryot, and I met hundreds of them, who did not prefer to hold his land from a zemindar rather than hold it direct from the Sircar. There is a human element present in the one case which is wholly absent in the other.

The real rat plague, then, in India, is poverty, and the flea which spreads the disease is the Government. The emaciated, bloodless body of the ryot has no plague-resisting power, and so the fell