diminution of his power to make demand for cloth, attended, necessarily, by increase in the quantity of cotton for which a foreign market was required. The more these effects were produced, the lower became the price of cotton; and thus was realized the effect of an almost total annihilation of the value of agricultural labor, as a consequence of measures adopted with a view to compel the whole people to look to agriculture alone for the means of supporting life. Further, while the price of cotton has thus been rendered wholly dependent upon the market of England, there, too, is fixed the price of cloth-the consequences of which are seen in the facts, that this whole people has become a mere instrument to be used by trade, and that in India, as in Ireland, Portugal, Turkey, and the West Indies, may, in most abundance, be found the data upon which to rest the doctrine of over-population.

§ 4. The poor ryot pays, as we see, twelve, fifteen, or twenty pence for the pound of cotton that had yielded him but a single penny; and all this difference is paid for the services of others, while he, himself, is unemployed. "A great part of the time of the laboring population in India is," says Mr. Chapman, "spent in idleness. I," as he continues, "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 improve ment; 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."*

"Half the human time and energy," as we are here told, “runs to waste," but the author of this passage might have gone much further, and yet been far within the truth. Where there is no commerce, and men are, consequently, forced to depend on the CHAPMAN: Cotton and Commerce of India, p. 110.

distant trade, nine-tenths of the physical and mental efforts of a community run to waste;" and therefore it is that not only does capital not accumulate, but the accumulations of past times are then in course of daily diminution. With the decline in the power to maintain commerce, there is a daily increase in the necessity for resorting to the distant market, but with every such increase the commodities requiring to be transported increase in bulk and decline in value; and therefore it is, that the trader and transporter are enabled to take for themselves a constantly increasing proportion of a diminished product-leaving a constantly diminishing one for the cultivator. Their cotton and their food travelled readily to all portions of the world in the form of cloth, and they then consumed liberally of clothing; but now, when their raw cotton, their ricc, and their sugar, have to go abroad in their rudest shapes, the quantity of finished commodities they have the power to pay for is so small, that the price paid for their transportation scarcely enters into the compensation of the men, oxen, wagons, and ships, required for the work. Nearly the whole burden of the double voyage is therefore borne by the raw material; and, as in Turkey, Portugal, Ireland, and all other agricultural countries, the difficulty of making new roads, or of maintaining old ones, increases from year to year.

From important cotton districts, transportation is effected at the rate of seven miles per day, and requires more than a hundred days; and if the "herd of bullocks is overtaken by rain, the cotton, saturated by moisture, becomes heavy, and the black clayey soil, through which lies the whole line of road, sinks under the feet of a man above the ankle, and under that of a laden ox to the knees. In this predicament the cargo of cotton lies sometimes for weeks on the ground, and the merchant is ruined."*

"So miserably bad," says another writer, "are the existing means of communication with the interior, that many of the most valuable articles of produce are, for want of carriage and a market, often allowed to perish on the farm, while the cost of that which found its way to the port was enormously enhanced; but the quantity did not amount to above twenty per cent. of the whole of the produce, the remainder of the articles always being greatly deteriorated."

* London Economist.

Such being the modes of transportation, we can readily understand why it is that cotton yields its cultivator but a penny a pound and why, too, it is, that the producer of the more bulky food is in a condition that is even worse, now that the consumer has disappeared from his side. When the crop is large, scarcely any price can be obtained for grain ;* and when it is small, the people perish, by thousands and tens of thousands, of famine, because, in the existing state of the roads, there can be little or no exchange of the rude products of the earth.

§ 5. The state of things above described, results necessarily from the maintenance of a system which looks to the annihilation of commerce through the exclusion of the great middle class of mechanics and working-men; and which thus resolves a great nation into a mass of wretched cultivators on the one hand, and grasping money-lenders on the other. The chain of society is, here, totally destitute of the connecting links, as a consequence of which there is neither motion nor force. Capital being wasted weekly to an amount greater than the annual value of the goods imported, there can be no accumulation. "None," says

Colonel Sleeman,† "have stock equal to half their rent." They are dependent, everywhere, on the produce of the year, and however small may be its amount, the taxes must be paid; and, of all that thus goes abroad, nothing is returned. The soil gets nothing, and, as the condition upon which the earth makes her loans to man is daily, hourly, and universally violated, no surprise need be felt on reading, in Colonel Sleeman's interesting volumes, the numerous evidences he has furnished of the growing infertility of the land.

The works constructed in former times, for the purposes of irrigation, have been allowed to go to ruin,§ and the richest lands are being abandoned. Even in the valley of the Ganges, not a third of the cultivable lands is, says Mr. Chapman, under cultivation;|| while elsewhere he tells his readers, that of the cultivable

* "In 1846 or 1847, the collector was obliged to grant remission of land tax, because the abundance of former years lay stagnating in the province, and the low prices of grain from that cause prevented the ryots from being able to pay their fixed land assessment." " -CHAPMAN: Cotton and Commerce of India, p. 97.

+ Rambles in India, vol. i. p. 205.

CHAPMAN: Cotton and Commerce of India, p. 97.

† Ibid. p. 268.

|| Ibid. p. 22.

surface of all India, one-half is waste.* In the Madras presidency, not one-fifth of the land is cultivated; and yet famines are of constant occurrence, and of a severity known in no other portion of the world, while labor and land abound for which no employment can be obtained. The site of the so recently great manufacturing city of Dacca, presented to the view of Bishop Heber but an "impenetrable jungle ;" and it is as a necessary result of this, that East Indian journals are required to remind their readers of the millions of acres of rich lands that might be made to yield cotton. that now are lying waste. Look to what quarter we may of that magnificent country, we meet with evidence of declining individuality and diminished power of combination, accompanied by daily increasing centralization, of which the annexation of Oude affords the most striking of all the late examples and centralization, slavery, and death travel always together, whether in the material or the moral world.

When population and wealth diminish, the rich soils are first abandoned, as is shown in the Campagna of Rome, in the valley of Mexico, and in the deltas of the Ganges and the Nile. Without combination of effort, they could never have been brought under cultivation, and their present abandonment is but the evidence of the disappearance of the power of association and combination. Driven back to the poor soils, and forced to send abroad the product, the wretched Hindoo becomes poorer from day to day, and the less he obtains, the more does he become a slave to the caprices of his landlord; and the more is he thrown upon the mercy of the money-lender, who lends on good security at three

* Cotton and Commerce of India, p. 25.

+ "If a ryot sunk a well, his rent was raised; if he cut a small canal, it was nearly doubled. There was, therefore, no possibility of improvement. Moreover, the land being divided among cottiers whose only capital was their labor, two bad seasons reduced them to the verge of starvation. In such cases, the whole revenue was occasionally lost in remissions. Of course, nobody ever grew rich, and in all the presidency there are probably not ten farmers worth £1000. The area of cultivation is only one-fifth the area of the presidency, and shows no tendency to increase." London Times.

Hitherto, the proceeds of the taxation of the people of Oude have been, to a considerable extent, locally expended; and have aided in making a demand for labor and its products. Now, they are to be transferred to Calcutta, and are likely to add, as we are told, two millions of pounds to the Company's revenue. Taxation, when its proceeds are locally expended, is but a question of distribution. When not so expended, it is a question of exhaustion. Ten millions, in the one case, would not work as large an amount of ruin, as one in the other.

per cent. per month, but from him must have fifty or a hundred per cent. for a loan until harvest. That, under such circumstances, the wages of labor are very low, even where the wretched people are employed, is only what might naturally be expected. In some places, the laborer has two, and in others three, rupees, or less than a dollar and a half, per month. The officers employed on the great zemindary estates have from three to four rupees, and the police receive but forty-eight rupees ($23) per annum, out of which they supply themselves with food and clothing! Such are the rewards of labor in a country possessing every conceivable means of accumulating wealth; and they become less from year to year. *

§ 6. Throughout the world, and in all ages, the advance. towards civilization having been in the ratio of the tendency towards local activity, and towards the development of individual faculty, and the system now under consideration looking to results directly the reverse of this, we might reasonably expect to find, at every step, an increasing tendency in the reverse direction. Growing civilization is marked by increased security of person and property, and that increase is found as we pass from the old possessions of the Company, and towards the newly-acquired ones.† Crime of every kind, gang robbery, perjury, and forgery, abound in Bengal and Madras, and the poverty of the cultivator

The Court of Directors inform us that there has been a diminution in the total receipts from land in the old provinces of Bengal since 1843-44 ;' and certainly no one can be surprised to hear it. In the Madras presidency the people are wretchedly poor, the land of little value, and cultivation kept up only by forced methods, the inhabitants being unwilling to cultivate it on any terms. In Bombay, the receipts have fallen off, and the country generally,' we are told, is not prosperous.' From a member in the council of that presidency we learn that India is verging to the lowest ebb of pauperism;' and that the payments to government are made by the inhabitants pawning or selling their personal ornaments, and even their cattle, furniture, and tools; that is, the capital of the country is encroached upon to pay the taxes. It was the same officer who told a parliamentary committee, five years since, that the condition of the cultivators in India was greatly depressed, and, he feared, declining.' The aristocracy among the natives are sinking out of sight, the race of native gentry has almost everywhere disappeared, and the peasantry are becoming reckless through ruin. Every few years a famine occurs; and government spends, in hopeless efforts to keep the people alive, the money which would have made roads to the granaries, to the ports, and to the surplus of happier provinces. Where food should have been passing, in exchange for other commodities, the way was strewn with the gaunt corpses of half millions of people starved to death."London Daily News.

† See Campbell's Modern India, chap. xi.