FOOTNOTES:
[15] Compare the Attis of Catullus LXIII. 50. “Patria o mei creatrix, patria o mea genetrix.... Ego gymnasei fui flos,” etc.
[16] Report in Mr. Tilak’s paper, the Mahratta, January 13, 1907.
[17] Report in the Mahratta, June 30, 1907.
[18] On June 24, 1908, Mr. Tilak was again arrested for alleged sedition contained in an article of the Kesari, commenting on the suppressive measures introduced after the discovery of bombs in Calcutta. He was tried in Bombay before Mr. Justice Davar and a special jury of seven Europeans and two Parsis. The jury was unable to agree, but the judge accepted the verdict of guilty from seven against two, and Mr. Tilak was sentenced to six years’ transportation and a fine of 1000 rupees (July 22, 1908).
CHAPTER IV
The Ryot’s Burden
Several times in Poona I met a Mr. Junshi (as I will call him), who lived in one of the beautiful houses the Mahrattas used to build while their Peshwas still reigned. He was an oldish man, for an Indian, but thin, bright-eyed and alert, and from his mouth statistics flowed like water from a fountain statue. One day I called on him, and was shown into the open courtyard of old marble and teak, round which the main building rose in three stories; but beyond I could see another courtyard, more beautiful and cooler still, where lived his wife, his sons’ wives, his nieces, and other ladies of the blood, and beyond that again there was a glimpse of leaves and brilliant flowers.
“We require flowers,” he said, “for the worship of our idols. We worship our idols here in the house every morning and evening, hanging garlands round their necks and placing bunches of flowers before them. You, I believe, worship only once a week.”
I told him I had been brought up on family prayers that never failed in regularity, even when we were at the seaside, and this pleased him very much.
“However,” he went on, “I think we have an advantage in acknowledging so many gods in our pantheon that each of us can choose which he likes best. For each of our idols is a symbol of some divine attribute, and helps the worshipper to fix his thoughts upon the attribute he most desires to worship.”
“But some of us also,” I said, “find it helpful to contemplate images representing the attributes of motherly love, chastity, compassion, or courage in the face of evil; and we offer flowers to them.”
This pleased him too, but when we reached his long room upstairs we turned from idols to the main interest of his life. On bookshelves round the walls, and heaped upon the floor and tables, were hundreds of volumes and pamphlets crammed with figures. It seemed as if the owner had collected every book and essay ever written upon the economics of India, and year by year had filtered them into his mind. He had the instinct for averages which I take to be the economist’s instinct. He thought of women and children in terms of addition; he saw men as columns walking. He watched the rising and falling curves of revenue, expenditure, and population as others watch the curves of beauty. Any line of figures was welcome to his spirit, and though he had made his living by teaching little Indians to read “Robinson Crusoe,” his chief study seemed to lie in the scripture called the “Statistical Abstract relating to British India.” Upon this careful piece of literature he meditated day and night; or, if his mind required a change, he relaxed it on theology.
I have called the “Statistical Abstract” literature, and to him it was so. To him it was as pleasing as a poem to know that under the heading of “Priests and others engaged in religion,” the number of “total supported” was 2,728,812, among whom 178,656 females were classified as “actual workers”; or that the total supported by “indefinite and disreputable occupations” was 737,033, and in this class alone the male and female “actual workers” were approximately equal. He liked to meditate on the daily average of prisoners in the various provinces, and on the infirmities of population according to residence and according to age. It was good to know that there were about 6,000,000 more males than females in the country, but 18,000,000 more widows than widowers, and 391,000 widows under fifteen. These were the lyrics or realistic ballads of his reading, but he took higher interest in the figures that move with something of epic grandeur. To him there was a splendour and æsthetic satisfaction in knowing that the total of India’s population, including the Native States, was 294,361,056 in 1901, and that of this number 207,050,557 were Hindus like himself; while agriculture supported 191,691,731—close upon two-thirds, or 65·16 per cent., as he put it—and 15,686,421 (including nearly 1,000,000 females) could write and read, a total of 1,125,231 being “literate in English.”
But I think, after all, it was the great passage headed “Finance” that he enjoyed with the most delicate appreciation for style. Perhaps it depended on his mood whether he more admired the lines of the “Gross Revenue and Expenditure” or of the “Net Revenue and Expenditure.” It was sonorous as a hexameter to read aloud that the total gross revenue in India and England for 1905-6 was £84,997,685, and the total gross expenditure charged to revenue was £82,905,831. But the net statements of revenue at £48,539,680, and expenditure at £46,447,826, were trim as a sonnet. It was a dubious point, but for details he certainly preferred the gross, thinking them more realistic, and his favourite passage was that beginning, “Principal heads of Revenue, Land Revenue, £18,862,169, for 1905-6.” Against this he would set, as a kind of antiphone, the gross expenditure on army services (excluding Marine and Military Works) of £19,267,130.[19]
There were two passages also from which he appeared to derive the kind of savage pleasure most men seek in tragedy or satire. One was that the gross expenditure on education by the Government of India amounted to less than £1,700,000 in 1905-6, and he worked out the State expenditure for education for the current year (1907-8) at 1½d. per head in India, as against 5s. 4d. per head in France. The other was that the Hindus, Mohammedans, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Animists contributed out of their labour during the year of grace which we had just survived (1906-7) the sum of £125,906 in order that the British residents might not be devoid of the consolations of religion as represented by Bishops and Anglican chaplains, Roman priests, Presbyterian divines, and cemeteries.
For myself, there was, of course, a certain ironic interest in the endowment of an Anglo-Indian’s Christianity by the natives around him, and for the first time I was inclined to favour a system of payment by results. But, in regard to Finance, all such things are insignificant in comparison with the one main question of the tax upon the cultivator.[20]
An immemorial custom in India, consolidated in the Laws of Manu, gave the ruler a share in all crops—a fraction fluctuating according to the soil, but not higher than one quarter. Probably this was a tribute levied upon the village community in return for protection, or simply as a penalty for conquest. It was paid in kind, so much grain from so much crop, and as the proportion was always the same on the same ground, the peasant did not feel the variation in quantity much. But having inherited the custom, the British rulers found it more convenient and uniform to collect the tax in cash, and to levy the rate, not in proportion to each year’s crop, but on a valuation that remains unaltered for long terms of years—usually thirty years in Madras and Bombay, but twenty years in other places, for instance in the Punjab. This process of valuation is called the Settlement, and Settlement Officers are almost continually engaged in drawing up a kind of progressive Doomsday Book upon the fields, pastures, woods, and wells of each village. It is hardly possible to ascertain the exact proportion of value fixed by the Settlement Officers as the tax. Throughout India there is a general understanding that “about one-half of the well-ascertained net assets should be the Government demand.”[21] This income tax of ten shillings in the pound is, however, in reality a fairly steady minimum, and the tax often goes higher, to say nothing of the “cesses” or local taxes nominally levied for roads and education.
Whether the money is called tax or rent, would not seem at first sight to make much difference; for it has to be paid and the people who pay it have no voice in its levy or in its expenditure. If it is a tax, it is a large income tax on land, fixed for some years and collected from the smallest landowners as well as the largest. If it is a rent, the system is partial land-nationalization without national control and without economic freedom. But as a matter of practice, the difference in the use of words is vital, and it cannot be put more plainly than in the Minute written by Lord Salisbury when he was Secretary of State for India in 1875:—
“If we say that it is rent, the modern Indian statesman will hold the Government in strictness entitled to all that remains after wages and profits have been paid, and he will do what he can to hasten the advent of the day when the State shall no longer be kept by any weak compromises from the enjoyment of its undoubted rights. If we persuade him that it is revenue, he will note the vast disproportion of its incidence compared to that of other taxes, and his efforts will tend to remedy the inequality, and to lay upon other classes and interests a more equitable share of the fiscal burden. I prefer the latter tendency to the former.”[22]
The average Indian official does not agree with Lord Salisbury. He prefers the rent theory to the tax theory, and when the cultivator has been allowed his subsistence off the holding, together with what the official estimates as profit, the rent is taken in the name of revenue, but under the excuse of rent, and I have often heard officials urge the theory of land nationalization in their defence. It is, however, as I said, a nationalization in which the conditions of political and economic freedom are absent.
The new assessment, which in Bombay lasts for thirty years, depends almost entirely on the discretion of the Settlement Officer. His decision is supervised by higher authorities, but it usually stands, and the only fixed rule for his guidance is that he may not increase the revenue of a Taluka (group of villages) by more than 33 per cent., nor that of a single village by more than 66 per cent., nor that of a single holding by more than 100 per cent. This leaves him plenty of margin, and in fifteen large districts of the Bombay Presidency we find that the average increase was 30·4 per cent. at the last assessment (1899).[23] This increase is assessed, not on the yield of the ground, but on the “capabilities” of the ground, and “capabilities” are calculated upon the quality of the soil, the average rainfall, the market, the railway, and other elements of “unearned increment.” Mr. Vaughan Nash’s account of the matter expresses what happens:—
“The officer appointed to value the land and fix the assessment has made his shot—I use the expression advisedly—at the average crop, and has determined the demand which is to hold for the next twenty or thirty years; and in theory it is understood that the cultivator is to enjoy not less than half the profits of his farm, beside the privilege of subsisting on its produce.... At the end of the assessment period the authorities make another shot; and now mark what happens. They find that since their last valuation prices have advanced, new railways have been made, cultivation has been intensified—or might be intensified, under a little pressure; and, after the due application of tests of all kinds, geological, botanical, hydrographical, meteorological, arboricultural, etc., it is discovered that land and farmer can bear an extra 30 per cent. or so on the old assessment.”[24]
We may assume the Settlement Officer to be a scrupulously honest and painstaking public servant. Let us assume that his knowledge of agriculture and local conditions is equal to his devotion. Still his responsibility is almost too great for the wisest and most zealous official. It is his official duty to raise as much as he decently can for the Government, whether he calls the sum tax or rent or share of profits. Against his decision there can be no resistance and no practicable appeal. The cultivator is not in reality a free agent in the new bargain, and if he protests that the payment is beyond his income, he is informed that, being incapable of cultivating his own land to the highest advantage, he must learn better or go.
Usually he does neither. In most cases he has no opportunity for learning better, and he cannot, or does not, go. He borrows. An anonymous writer once attacked me with scorn for saying that a large proportion of cultivators in Bombay were receiving no net income, no profits for themselves at all; they were simply existing on their land, and for their few clothes, medicines, and family festivals they were trying to get outside work, selling their family bangles, or appealing to the money-lender on the off-chance that a “bumper crop” might enable them to pay something some day.
“According to Mr. Nevinson,” cried this anonymous writer, “the ryots in the Presidency are such simpletons as to go on cultivating land, their income from such cultivation being always equalled by their cultivation expenses. Why, then, do they cultivate at all, when obviously by abandoning the land and its profitless cultivation they could at once better their position by devoting to other work the time and labour they now expend on cultivation.”[25]
The question is worthy of the old professorial economists, who never went beyond books for knowledge, and settled the affairs of human nature in their studies by their own conceptions of reason. They used to tell us that, when one trade failed, the labour devoted to it became absorbed in other occupations. I have often wondered, if their trade of theorizing failed, in what other occupation their labour would become absorbed. A large number of our Indian officials spend nearly the whole of their time dealing with abstractions and cases on paper, their feet under their writing-tables. The increasing pressure of the daily routine drives them further and further from reality, and one might suppose that this anonymous writer had never been face to face with a peasant in his home, or known anything of the peasant’s clinging to the land, or ever been thrown out of work and compelled to face starvation for a single day himself.
What I said was perfectly accurate. The Indian cultivator will cling to his land even when he makes no profit beyond his subsistence wage. I believe the same to be true of peasant proprietors or small holders in nearly every country; certainly it is true in France, Russia, and Ireland, for I have known cases in all three countries. So the Indian cultivator, when he makes no profit and is called upon for increased assessment or his daughter’s marriage, does not at once set off to Bombay and become a watchmaker or a docker, as economists think he ought. As I said, he borrows. Usually he goes to the village money-lender (banya or sowkar), and receives advances at 12 to 30 per cent. per annum, according to his character in the village. In reality, I think, the money-lender speculates on the chance of a “bumper crop” every few years, but in the last resort he may sell up the cultivator through the civil courts in Bombay, or convert him into his own labourer to work the land for him on a subsistence wage. In hopes of saving the ryot from this extortion, the Government has devised agricultural banks and other schemes for advancing loans at the reasonable interest of 5 per cent., and in course of time this benefit will probably increase. But at present the economists, as usual, have made the mistake of omitting the uncertain element in man, and he yet continues to prefer his familiar old money-lender to the most advantageous Government loan. In some districts I have heard there is a national feeling about it, but I suppose the chief reason really is that the Government claims its interest down on the nail for a fixed day, whereas the village money-lender can often be cajoled, bribed, frightened, or persuaded, like a reasonable tailor, to put off the dreaded moment of demand.
The actual cash amount of the assessment is not such an important question to the cultivator as its proportion to his income. The figures given for Deccan villages by Mr. Vaughan Nash in his “Family Budgets,” show an assessment of about two shillings an acre.[26] Many of the villages I visited were probably poorer, being in the mountains, but the average assessment tax in them appeared to be only a little over one shilling an acre, and sometimes as low as fivepence, on an average holding of twenty acres. The assessment, as I said, has now to be paid in cash on a certain day, often while the crop is still growing. If payment is not made, everything the peasant possesses can be seized and sold by the Revenue authorities—house and land, plough and oxen, bedding and cooking pot. That is the money-lender’s opportunity, and in practice it is usually the money-lender who hands over the cash. If he refuses a further advance, the Government is compelled either to cancel the debt (which is now often done in famine seasons), or to suspend the debt till next harvest (which is frequently done, but only puts off the evil day), or to sell the peasant up, which usually yields a very small price, and sometimes produces serious disturbances, as in the Deccan riots of 1875, when the money-lenders were burnt out and driven from the village.[27]
As is well known, nearly all the land in the Bombay Presidency, and far the greater part of Madras, is held on this “ryotwari” system, or peasant tenantry to the State, there being no intermediary at law between the Government and the cultivator, though the money-lender often acts as such. In many other provinces the land is owned by landlords, or “zemindars,” much as in our own country, and the revenue is taken from them, though it is ultimately paid by the cultivator. In Bengal the zemindars were granted a Permanent Settlement in 1793, which fixed the demands of the State so that no further assessment has been instituted, and revenue stands at an almost constant figure. The Rent Acts of 1859 and 1885 aimed at protecting the cultivators from the usual abuses and extortions of the landlord system, but whether the Permanent Settlement, which, of course, involves a great loss of revenue to Government, is justified or not by its results—whether the greater prosperity and intelligence of Bengal arise from the moderation and fixity of the assessment, or are due to climate, race, and enterprise, is one of those questions that are argued between officials and educated Indians with a kind of perpetual motion. A similar Permanent Settlement for the whole of India was proposed by Lord Canning just before his death in 1862, but finally abandoned twenty years later, after laborious discussion.[28]
The Ryot’s Home.
Carrying Leaves for Fuel.
[Face p. 92.
On leaving even small and beautiful cities like Poona you pass through a zone where the inhabitants enjoy the health and suffer from the scrappiness of suburbs. Here they live partly by gardening, partly by burning lime or working in the town, and their houses have a touch of urban refinement. The ceilings and the tops of the walls, for instance, are hung with those garish pictures of religious subjects—the adventures of Krishna, and other scenes—which would provide so suitable a market for German art. But the suburbs are short, within a few miles you enter the heart of the country, and in his primeval village are brought face to face with the ryot—the cultivator of the soil, the basis of the Indian Empire, the one man for whom, or at least by means of whom, all the rest of the intricate machinery exists, from the splendours of Simla down to the office of the “Remembrancer of Legal Affairs,” and the “Finger-print Bureau,” in Poona’s residential quarter, or to Lord Kitchener’s reviews in the Poona cantonment.
In my various journeys within a circle of twenty miles round the city, I found the ryot much what I had expected—gentle-mannered, patient, hardy, and incredibly thin, living with his family in a clean but dusty hut, furnished with little beyond a few brass pots and dishes. All day he was working in his field, and he gathered for converse at evening—“cow-dust time,” as they call it—on the steps of the village temple, in which a vague red image represents the idea of helpful strength—something like Hercules or the Archangel Michael; for it is the same Maruta who helped Rama on his wandering search for the beloved Sita.
I have never heard even the most frigid official speak evil of the ryot. As the best patronizers in the world, we find in the ryot a most suitable object for our characteristic capacity. Hard-working, sober, and reverential beyond the dreams of country parsons, he is exactly the sort of being to whom we enjoy extending the kindly and protective sympathy due from a squire to his villagers. Just as in Natal or Nigeria every one is ready to commend the untutored savage and pat his curly head provided he remains savage, so in India even the Anglo-Indian will admit a distant affection for the poor dear ryot, and regrets the good old times when hardly an Indian of them all made pretence to further education or equality. But education and equality are the two things that undermine our accustomed pedestal, and the thought of a time when we might no longer be required to exercise our national function of patronage fills us with dismay.
The crop and the assessment are the two kindred and vital points in the ryot’s earthly life, as distinguished from the life of his spirit. In the Deccan, as in all parts of India, the crop is simply a matter of opportune rainfall, and when I was in Poona there had been no good crop for fifteen years. That autumn the prospect was a little worse than ordinarily poor, though the main famine district of the year was in the United Provinces, far away north. Preparations for a serious famine had to be made already, for, as Sir William Hunter estimated, one-fifth of India’s population—say sixty million souls—are perpetually living on insufficient food, apart from famines; and, partly owing to the export-trade, the villagers no longer store grain to meet an evil day, nor do they possess cash to purchase grain from other parts of the country. So when the pinch of scarcity comes, the land-owning or land-taxing Government alone stands between them and starvation; and, indeed, the Government prides itself at all times upon its service as protector of the poor, especially against other landlords and money-lenders. There is always a good deal of justice in the claim, even when the Government, having first tempered the wind, proceeds to shear the lamb. But famine is the special opportunity for Government beneficence. All officials then vie with each other in the thankless labour of holding the bodies and souls of thousands together, and within a month of his landing as Governor of Bombay, Sir George Clarke had all his preparations ready for relief works, terracing of hills, sinking of wells, and remission (not merely suspension) of the year’s assessment money.
Of the assessment and of famine I had heard and read a great deal before, but one set of grievances, closely connected with both, was new to me. It arose from the Forest Laws—a subject we hardly consider in England unless we are thinking of William Rufus or the game-preserves of kilted City Fathers in the Highlands. The present strict system of forest preservation was, I believe, instituted after the terrible famine of 1877-78, with the admirable intention of restoring the rainfall. In old times the village communities maintained a tract of communal forest for grazing and fuel near each village, just as they did formerly in England, and still do in Russia. An ancient Indian custom set aside an acre of grazing for every acre of cultivated land. But under our rule the influence of village communities was to a great extent destroyed, because we remembered nothing like it in England, and the plough was suffered to encroach upon the forest till there was a real danger that no forest would be left and the rains would cease. Nothing could be better than the intention of the Forest Department in checking the process called “denudation,” but instead of restoring the control of forests to the villagers themselves under definite rules of maintenance, they centralized the managements as bureaucrats will, declared uncultivated land to be Government forest, prohibited wood-gathering or cattle-grazing without payment, let out the grass and timber by auction to contractors, and entered the proceeds to the advantage of the Department. There is no denying the benefits to Government and the contractors. The destruction of forest is checked, hay and fuel are supplied to the cavalry cantonments and cities, and the Department (including Burma) contributes a net sum of about £800,000 a year to the Indian exchequer.[29] Could anything be more desirable?
On the Causeway.
A Village Headman.
“But how about my buffalo?” cries the thin ryot of the valley. As Mr. Vaughan Nash said in his book on the Famine, the buffalo is quite as necessary to the Indian peasant as a boat to a fisherman. Buffaloes are necessary for work on the fields, manure for the soil, and milk for the family, to say nothing of fuel and flooring. No one who, like myself, has lived much in Kaffir huts with cow-dung floors, or has cooked on the veldt for weeks together with cow-dung as fuel, will make light of such uses. But still, when wood is to be had, only a fool uses cow-dung for cooking or even for flooring. In the Indian forests, wood is to be had, but the Forest Laws forbid the people to use it, and they are driven to floor and cook with the cow-dung that ought rightly to go as manure for the fields.
But the grazing is the chief difficulty, now that the old communal lands are being swallowed up by the Forest Department. The villagers may earn a few pence by cutting grass for the contractor who carts it away to the city, but the hungry buffaloes look up and are not fed. Even where a grazing allotment is made, it is too small, and I was in a village fifteen miles from Poona where the twelve families could afford to keep only one buffalo between them, and they had to pay rent to the Forest Department for the right of grazing that one buffalo and a few goats upon little patches of the vast hillsides, all of which they regarded as the common lands of the village for centuries past. The rent, no doubt, was very small, probably only a few shillings a year for the buffalo and goats, but the village income was very small too.
From the bureaucracy’s well-intentioned schemes, other peculiar results arise which perhaps did not occur to those who framed the laws. One case, for instance, was mentioned to me by several villagers as a kind of typical or proverbial absurdity. A waggon broke its wheel and the owner began to mend it. The village police, hearing the hammer, arrested him under Section E, paragraph 109 (or some such clause) of the Forest Laws, upon the charge of practising carpentry within a mile of the forest limit. In his innocence, he asked what he ought to have done to get his waggon home over the few hundred yards to his door. He was informed that he ought to have walked into Poona, twenty or thirty miles away, discovered the office of the Forest Department, waited till the proper official, who would very likely be in the country, returned to town, stated his case, and asked for a legal certificate authorizing him to cut timber for the repairs of his wheel on the spot. Then, with good luck, within a week or ten days from the accident, he might have found himself in a position to drive his waggon home in accordance with bureaucratic regulations. I believe, however, that this rule has now been modified, and that the man would only have to hunt a forest ranger for permission. But take another grievance, which recalls childhood’s memories of the Norman Conquest. The ryot’s little wealth of crop and stock is continually exposed to wild beasts—deer, wolves, panthers, and boars—just as our farmers’ crops are exposed to hares and rabbits. But under the Arms Act, the ryot has little chance of killing them himself. His duty is to walk into the nearest town and report the presence of a wild beast to the police. The police look round for an Englishman who wants something to kill. Frequently they advertise for one in the local papers, and usually they have not to wait very long. Off goes the Englishman—rifle, tiffin-basket, boy, bedding, and all. But in the meantime it is not improbable that the wild beast has walked away, or founded a whole new family even worse than himself. At the best, it is just possible that the Englishman may miss him.
While I was in India a movement was started for the protection of the helpless ryot from deer. In many parts of the country, especially in Rajputana and the Central Provinces, you may frequently see herds of deer and antelopes browsing upon the standing crops, to the great loss of the cultivator. It was alleged that the increase of deer was due to the gradual reduction of tigers (which are nature’s own corrective), and the proposal was to discourage the slaughter of tigers by withdrawing the Government reward of £3 6s. 8d. a head, or even to forbid the sport of shooting tigers unless they were proved by experience to be man-eaters. Personally, I think the latter regulation would be good, for the deer would be reduced, the crops protected, and the tigers increased. But I am not sure how far a ryot, in the interests of agriculture, would approve of a regulation that allowed one tiger one man.
The main grievances of the ryot against the Forest Department may be seen briefly stated in a memorial presented to the Governor of Madras by the cultivators of eight villages in the Salem district, April, 1908. The Forest Department proposed to reserve the Anurath Hills in the neighbourhood of the villages, and the memorial protested that already there was not much waste land for grazing, and hardly enough land even for cultivation. To reserve the hills would also deprive the villagers of wood and fuel, and inflict a kind of double assessment:—
“You settle our lands,” said the memorial, “every thirty years and raise the assessment. To pay this assessment we ought to cultivate our land with the aid of good manure. To have manure we must maintain sufficient stock of cattle. When we enter the forest to procure fodder, you demand permit fees; thus you demand double payment (one in the shape of land assessment and the other in the shape of forest fees) for the lands we cultivate.”
The memorial went on to say that, owing to the rigour of forest administration, the villagers, to protect themselves, had to bribe the subordinate officials of the Forest Department, and it concluded with the words:—
“We lead a peaceful life. It is the policy of the Government to keep every ryot in a contented and happy state. But in order to secure additional forest revenue, if you permit the Forest officials to enclose an additional reserve against our wishes, you will create much heart-burning and discontent against the Government.”
But let us put things at their best. Let us suppose there is neither drought, nor famine, nor plague. Let us assume that the assessment has been paid without borrowing, and the Forest Laws observed or evaded, that wild beasts have been killed, and yet the deer have not damaged the crops. Let us suppose that the ryot’s income reaches the highest possible average, which Lord Curzon calculated at £2 a year per head of the population, including all the rich merchants, bankers, and landowners. It is next to impossible that the average income in any village could be as much as that, but let us assume it is. Still it remains at only half what is spent per head in England every year on drink alone. It represents a standard of poverty which we can hardly conceive—a level where every fraction of a farthing counts. And yet I found within twenty miles of Poona a group of villages where the ryots clubbed together of their own accord to hire a schoolmaster at a salary of eight shillings a month. In face of a sacrifice so astonishing it appeared to me that all the outcries about the dangers of education in India that were then filling the speeches of our statesmen and the columns of the Times and Anglo-Indian papers, might with good hope be accounted vain.
A Temple Tank, Madras.
[Face p. 102.