There is a great drawback. The people are desperately poor. There is not a people the sun shines on, who are so sunken in the degradation of poverty as those of India. Ninety per cent. of them are connected with agriculture, and it is stated on good authority, that sixty per cent. of them do not get enough to eat, even of the coarsest food.
What can a people do for themselves when the average wage is not more than three rupees or three shillings a month? What can all the learned investigations and scientific reports of Government do for a people in such an utterly helpless condition? I am not speaking at random. I have seen and heard for myself, and know what I am talking about. To illustrate: Passing through a field where a man—almost naked—was rooting up the earth with a pair of small skeleton cattle, I had a chat with him about his life and crops. I asked him how much he got a year from all his labor. He replied, that if by working every day he could get a little food for himself and family, and at the close of the year could have enough to buy a cloth for himself, he would be happy. A whole year’s work for a little food, a little rice with weeds and stuff from his fields, not wheat or grain, as all the latter would have to be sold to pay the rent, and at the end have enough left to buy a cloth, worth less than a shilling!
The great curse of Indian agriculture, is the middlemen, the “zemindars,” or village owners. They do nothing except to pass their time in idleness and dissipation, spending more in one night on a nautch dance of prostitutes, than would dig a dozen wells, or build a good tank, while they live on the sweat and blood of their ryots. It is to the infamy of Government that it tolerates such a system of tyranny, injustice and robbery. Not one in ten thousand of these zemindars does anything for the benefit of his villagers.
I once talked with a great Maharajah with a long string of titles, who was ever head first when his name could be mentioned in public, and who privately was known as a screw, the owner of hundreds of villages, and I suggested some improvements for his people. “No,” he replied, “I have nothing to do with them, except to get my rents, all I want is my rupees,” and he was getting them by lacs a year. They are worse than vultures, for these are scavengers, destroyers of carrion, good birds, and never take life, but such men as this Maharajah, live and grow fat on the lives of their serfs. It is evident that I grow warm, yes hot, on this subject, and why not?
Another thing I cannot abide, and that is the learned nonsense about improving the condition of the agricultural population by some high flown scientific processes. You might as well form a society to cultivate the valleys of the moon, or “go about to turn the sun to ice by fanning in his face with a peacock’s feather.”
Lighten the burdens of poverty, and the crushing of the ryots, by less taxation, by the destruction of the leeches, the zemindars, and then the people would have something on which to live and help themselves. The permanent prosperity of a country depends on agriculture, and India will never come up, it is now at its lowest depth, until the condition of the ryots is radically changed.
The editor of a prominent India paper says: “The direct effect of unduly low rents is careless husbandry. Instead of benefiting the cultivator, such rents are a mere incentive to idleness.” What a sapient conclusion! His publishers should have immediately cut down his wages so that they might not be an incentive to his idleness.
This reminds me of a bunya who sold cloth, traveling from one bazar to another. He purchased a fine, stout pony to carry his goods. The beast was so fat that he diminished its food, and as it traveled so well, he increased its load. He continued to do both, until the poor brute, of its own accord, discontinued eating and going, and the man wondered what gave it such an incentive to idleness. But he had not the wisdom of the editor.
An expert sent out by Government says in his report, “Until a more adequate collection of statistics is made nothing can be done for agriculture!” I might use some very harsh words, if I should relieve my mind by using epithets regarding such twaddle, so I refrain. Yet I cannot forbear saying that one of the things for which I have an unsurmountable contempt is an educated fool.
Referring to these Government learned scientific investigators recalls to me an incident. One of my neighbors went on furlough. He had several valuable horses, which he left in the care of his sais. They were large, strong-limbed, well-proportioned animals. But something seemed to be the matter with them. They became thinner and thinner and drooped, standing for hours with their heads down and their legs scarcely supporting their bodies. Some of the neighbors happened around in the mornings and formed a kind of committee of investigation, as they did not like to see such fine animals go to the dogs and vultures, and beside, they had some regard for the interests of their friend. At length they decided to send for a distinguished veterinary surgeon, several hundred miles away. One suggested that this would be expensive. Others blanked the expense; they couldn’t let the horses die. The vet came, took a general look at the beasts and stood silently as if meditating where to begin. At last he spoke, “Gentlemen, this is a very serious matter, very strange; never saw anything like it in an experience of forty years. Yes, gentlemen, in forty years. Here are young, fine, well built animals slowly dying by inches, and yet apparently without disease. I will have to investigate, and it will be some days before I can make a report.” The days went on, and the vet stayed on, at a salary of fifty rupees a day to somebody. The weeks passed, and notwithstanding the vet’s investigation and long report, the horses grew thinner, and then the poor brutes went to death for want of breath, or, to be explicit, they died because they hadn’t strength enough to breathe, and not because they were sick or diseased. The vultures sang requiems over their bones, and said, “It was a strange case, very strange, the like they had never seen in all their experience of years, all skin and bones, not a particle of meat; very strange.” So said we all of us, “a very strange case.”