THE SECRETARY OF STATE AND PROSPERITY' 117 Trades Unions, Labour Loan Societies, Railway Savings Banks, Trustee Banks, and Post Office Savings Banks. How many people realise what these savings mean? They are savings-let me emphasise the fact !-and therefore PROPERTY, in addition to all that the homes of these investors contain of valuables of every kind, and after all indebtedness has been met. In a prosperous year in India, when the rains have come in due season, when the land has been sufficiently ploughed, when the sun has been all-beneficial, when insect pests have been at a minimum, when cattle have been in plenty, and when a bountiful harvest has been gathered in, which happens hardly once in ten years, not even when the land has lain fallow in a jubilee' year of famine; conceive, I say, what all this would mean from Himalayan snows to Equatorial heat over so vast an area as the India of the Emperor Edward VII. covers; then bear in mind the full value of all the produce is £150,000,000 less than the savings—the well and safely-invested savings—of the labourer, the artisan, and the lower middle-class person, in England. This may be stated in another way:-- British lower middle class and artisan invested savings: Number affected: say, 25,000,000. Total value of all the crops raised in India in a good year: 258 crores of rupees, £172,000,000 Number affected: 230,000,000. I ask the reader to turn to the first page of this chapter, to once more go through the various matters discussed, to remember all the figures employed are Indian official figures, and then to put to himself the question, 'How can such a condition of things denote the prosperity of the native Indian people?' And, that they are prosperous is stoutly proclaimed by the Secretary of State of India by voice and pen on every conceivable opportunity. CHAPTER IV FAMINES THEIR PRESENT FREQUENCY AND THE CAUSE OF THAT FREQUENCY Famine Deaths versus War Deaths. The Exceptional Famine-Position of India: Famine Come to Stay. Famine 'a Good Thing: There are Too Many People in India.' Sympathy Always with an Over-ruling Consideration for the Revenue.' Famines Prior to British Rule. Sir George Campbell on Frequency.' The Famines of the Eighteenth Century. A Comparison between 1769-1800 and 1868-69-1900. Over Twenty-six Million Famine Deaths Officially Admitted. .Five Famines. Maps showing the First and the Last Famines of the Nineteenth Century. The Economic Drain the Chief Cause of Famine. Mr. W. L. Hare's Table of Famines since 1729. After the Word, the Deed. A Minus Population of 36,000,000. Estimate by the Lancet and the Friend of India of 19,000,000 Famines More Destructive Now than in Ancient Days. Scarcity of Means more than Absence of Food Stores. British Supremacy founded on Belief that a Dark Skin Governmental Neglect to follow Recommendations of The First Place' for Irrigation, but Railways favoured Indian People now so Poor they Cannot Stand Any Strain. Lord Curzon and his Begging Bowl. Is it Too Late to Bring India Back to Prosperity? Vox India Clamantis (Punch). To the Honoured Memory of the Famine-Slain, Appendices: I. Letter extracted from the Author's Correspondence with Sir II. 'The Extreme, the Abject, the Awful, Poverty of the Indian III. What the Famine of 1877-78 cost-Madras chiefly. 'A red-haired child Sick in a fever, if you touch him once Though but as little as a finger-tip, Will set you weeping: but a million sick You would as soon weep for the rule of three BROWNING. THE time has passed when, in beginning a chapter on Famines in India, argument was essential to indicate the present exceptional position of India in respect to the most dire scourge known to humanity. On all hands, and by every one who has made any study of the question, it is accepted that famine is now chronic in certain parts of India, including even some irrigated regions. So much has the fact of famine having come to stay grown into the warp and woof of our ordinary life in Britain, that we hear of tens of millions of our fellow-subjects actually perishing, and, literally, of ninetenths of us, it is true that we pass by on the other side of the way as if the fact concerned us not at all. Or, we say, 'A good thing, surely. There are too many people in India.' This-will it be believed?-is said to me by two FAMINE BECOME A CHILD AT HOME' 121 out of every four Englishmen to whom I mention the fact of India's gruesome state. Even more significant is the circumstance that, as with hospitals and other necessary alleviations of suffering, an Indian Famine Relief Fund is now looked upon as always in existence or needing to be in existence, and rich, philanthropicallyminded, maiden ladies are beginning to leave legacies to such a Fund. Therefore, it is not with famine as with some strange portent from the Unseen with which we have to deal, but something abiding with us;-slightly varying familiar words, famine has become 'No more a stranger or a guest, But like a child at home.' 'A child at home '-part of the imagery is exact; to be quite exact, in the portion of the home it occupies, the child has become Master. My observations on Indian famines must be general in their character rather than exhaustive. There is no need for an exhaustive treatment in these pages. A small library of books has already been published on the subject. I shall simply show that India, under British rule, has become (the reader will, please, in his reading, carefully note and emphasise this word) chronically faminestricken, and shall furnish some particulars, from official sources, which indicate that the famines of the past twenty years might have been prevented if the course which was strongly recommended to the Indian authorities by the Famine Commission in 1880, had been adopted. Following from these statements is the deduction-of the truth and accuracy of which, sorrowfully, I am fully convinced-that famines in India, under our 1 On August 6, 1901, the provisions of the will of Miss Eliza Warrington, of the Belvidere, Malvern Wells, were published. The first provision in it read as follows: £1,000 to the Lord Mayor of London as trustee to pay the same into the Indian Famine Fund; if there be no such Fund in existence at her decease, then on trust to be held and invested by the Lord Mayor and his successors until another Indian Famine Fund shall be opened, and thereupon such grant and its accumulations shall be paid to such Fund.' |