crime. And lastly, if the poor are left to individual charity, a vast amount of mendicity is inevitable. What the State may and should abandon to private charity, is the task of distinguishing between one case of real necessity and another. Private charity can give more to the more deserving. The State must act by general rules. It cannot undertake to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving indigent. It owes no more than subsistence to the first, and can give no less to the last. There is probably no country in which, by varying the means suitably to the character of the people, a legal provision for the destitute might not be made compatible with the observance of the conditions necessary to its being innocuous.' SOME IMMEDIATE CAUSES OF POVERTY. 'Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public, prodigality and misconduct', says Adam Smith. The impoverishment of India by 'public prodigality and misconduct' is the charge we are now about to lay to the account of our Anglo-Indian administration. Many unhappy factors, as have been noticed in the previous pages, have conspired to make the condition of the Indian people one of extreme distress ; but over and above them all stand the immediate causes of our poverty-high taxation, the waste of large sums of money. in unproductive works, and the heavy drainage of our money to foreign countries-the effects of an unsympathetic alien domination. It is essential for a proper presentation of the case to cast a retrospective look behind, and to give a hurried outline to our readers of that phase of Indian economical history which has been primarily affected by the change of governments. Hindu India-or India before the 11th century-was divided into a number of more or less petty States and Principalities like the Italy of the Middle Ages. To calculate the revenues of the several dynasties of kings who ruled simultaneously in India is an hopeless task, but from the Institutes of Manu-that invaluable mine of ancient Indian histoty-and from the writings of foreign annalists, speci |