Carey expanded and published his "Address respecting an Agricultural Society in India" in the quarterly Friend of India. He still thinks it necessary to apologise for his action by quoting his hero, Brainerd, who was constrained to assist his Indian converts with his counsels in sowing their maize and arranging their secular concerns. "Few," he adds with the true breadth of genius which converted the Baptist shoemaker into the Christian statesman and scholar, "who are extensively acquainted with human life, will esteem these cares either unworthy of religion or incongruous with its highest enjoyments." When Carey wrote, the millions of five-acre farmers in India were only beginning to recover from the oppression and neglect of former rulers and the visitation of terrific famines. Trade was as depressed as agriculture. Transit duties, not less offensive than those of the Chinese, continued to weigh down agricultural industry till Lord W. Bentinck's time and later. The English Government levied an unequal scale of duties on the staples of the East and West Indies, against which the former petitioned in vain. The East India Company kept the people in ignorance, and continued to exclude the European capitalist and captain of labour. The large native landholders were as uneducated as the cultivators. Before all Carey set these reforms: close attention to the improvement of land, the best method of cropping land, the introduction of new and useful plants, the improvement of the implements of husbandry, the improvement of live stock, the bringing of waste lands under cultivation, the improvement of horticulture. He went on to show that, in addition to the abundance which an improved agriculture would diffuse throughout the country, the surplus of grain exported, besides "her opium, her indigo, her silk, and her cotton," would greatly tend to enrich India and endear Britain to her. "Whatever may be thought of the Government of Mr. Hastings and those who immediately preceded him for these last forty years, India has certainly enjoyed such a Government as none of the provinces of the Persian or the Roman Empire ever enjoyed for so great a length of time in succession, and, indeed, one almost as new in the annals of modern Europe as in those of India."
Carey found one of the greatest obstacles to agricultural progress to be the fact that not one European owned a single foot of the soil, "a singular fact in the history of nations," removed only about the time of his own death. His remarks on this have a present significance:—
"It doubtless originated in a laudable care to preserve our Indian fellow-subjects from insult and violence, which it was feared could scarcely be done if natives of Britain, wholly unacquainted with the laws and customs of the people, were permitted to settle indiscriminately in India. While the wisdom of this regulation at that time is not impugned, however, it may not be improper to inquire whether at the present time a permission to hold landed property, to be granted by Government to British subjects in India, according to their own discretion, might not be of the highest benefit to the country, and in some degree advantageous to the Government itself.
"The objections which have been urged against any measure of this nature are chiefly that the indiscriminate admission of Europeans into the country might tend to alienate the minds of the inhabitants from Britain, or possibly lead to its disruption from Britain in a way similar to that of America. Respecting this latter circumstance, it is certain that, in the common course of events, a greater evil could scarcely befall India. On the continuance of her connection with Britain is suspended her every hope relative to improvement, security, and happiness. The moment India falls again under the dominion of any one or any number of native princes, all hope of mental improvement, or even of security for person or property, will at once vanish. Nothing could be then expected but scenes of rapine, plunder, bloodshed, and violence, till its inhabitants were sealed over to irremediable wretchedness, without the most distant ray of hope respecting the future. And were it severed from Britain in any other way, the reverse felt in India would be unspeakably great. At present all the learning, the intelligence, the probity, the philanthropy, the weight of character existing in Britain, are brought to bear on India. There is scarcely an individual sustaining a part in the administration of affairs who does not feel the weight of that tribunal formed by the suffrages of the wise and the good in Britain, though he be stationed in the remotest parts of India. Through the medium of a free press the wisdom, probity, and philanthropy which pervade Britain exercise an almost unbounded sway over every part of India, to the incalculable advantage of its inhabitants; constituting a triumph of virtue and wisdom thus unknown to the ancients, and which will increase in its effects in exact proportion to the increase in Britain of justice, generosity, and love to mankind. Let India, however, be severed from Britain, and the weight of these is felt no more...
"It is a fact that in case of outrage or injury it is in most cases easier for a native to obtain justice against a European, than for a European to obtain redress if insulted or wronged by a native. This circumstance, attended as it may be with some inconvenience, reflects the highest honour on the British name; it is a fact of which India affords almost the first instance on record in the annals of history. Britain is nearly the first nation in whose foreign Courts of Justice a tenderness for the native inhabitants habitually prevails over all the partialities arising from country and education. If there ever existed a period, therefore, in which a European could oppress a native of India with impunity, that time is passed away—we trust for ever. That a permission of this nature might tend to sever India from Britain after the example of America is of all things the most improbable...
"Long before the number of British landholders in India shall have become considerable, Penang and the Eastern Isles, Ceylon, the Cape, and even the Isles of New South Wales, may in European population far exceed them in number; and unitedly, if not singly, render the most distant step of this nature as impracticable, as it would be ruinous, to the welfare and happiness of India...
"British-born landholders would naturally maintain all their national attachments, for what Briton can lose them? and derive their happiness from corresponding with the wise and good at home. If sufficiently wealthy, they would no doubt occasionally visit Britain, where indeed it might be expected that some of them would reside for years together, as do the owners of estates in the West Indies. While Britain shall remain what she now is, it will be impossible for those who have once felt the force of British attachments, ever to forego them. Those feelings would animate their minds, occupy their conversation, and regulate the education and studies of their children, who would be in general sent home that they might there imbibe all those ideas of a moral and intellectual nature for which our beloved country is so eminent. Thus a new intercourse would be established between Britain and the proprietors of land in India, highly to the advantage of both countries. While they derived their highest happiness from the religion, the literature, the philanthropy and public spirit of Britain, they would, on the other hand, be able to furnish Britain with the most accurate and ample information relative to the state of things in a country in which the property they held there constrained them to feel so deep an interest. The fear of all oppression being out of the question, while it would be so evidently the interest not only of every Briton but of every Christian, whether British or native, to secure the protecting aid of Britain, at least as long as two-thirds of the inhabitants of India retained the Hindoo or Mussulman system of religion, few things would be more likely to cement and preserve the connection between both countries than the existence of such a class of British-born landholders in India."
It is profitable to read this in the light of subsequent events—of the Duff-Bentinck reforms, the Sepoy mutiny, the government of the Queen-Empress, the existence of more than three millions of Christians in India, the social and commercial development due to the non-officials from Great Britain and America, and the administrative progress under Lord Curzon and Lord Minto.
There is one evil which Carey never ceased to point out, but which the very perfection of our judicial procedure and the temporary character of our land assessments have intensified—"the borrowing system of the natives." While 12 per cent. is the so-called legal rate of interest; it is never below 36, and frequently rises to 72 per cent. Native marriage customs, the commercial custom of "advances," agricultural usage, and our civil procedure combine to sink millions of the peasantry lower than they were, in this respect, in Carey's time. For this, too, he had a remedy so far as it was in his power to mitigate an evil which only practical Christianity will cure. He was the first to apply in India that system of savings banks which the Government has of late sought to encourage.
At a time when the English and even Scottish universities denied their honorary degrees to all British subjects who were not of the established churches, Brown University, in the United States—Judson's—spontaneously sent Carey the diploma of Doctor of Divinity. That was in the year 1807. In 1823 he was elected a corresponding member of the Horticultural Society of London, a member of the Geological Society, and a Fellow of the Linnæan Society. To him the latter year was ever memorable, not for such honours which he had not sought, but for a flood of the Damoodar river, which, overflowing its embankments and desolating the whole country between it and the Hoogli, submerged his garden and the mission grounds with three feet of water, swept away the botanic treasures or buried them under sand, and destroyed his own house. Carey was lying in bed at the time, under an apparently fatal fever following dislocation of the hip-joint. He had lost his footing when stepping from his boat. Surgical science was then less equal to such a case than it is now, and for nine days he suffered agony, which on the tenth resulted in fever. When hurriedly carried out of his tottering house, which in a few hours was scoured away by the rush of the torrent into a hole fifty feet deep, his first thought was of his garden. For six months he used crutches, but long before he could put foot to the ground he was carefully borne all over the scene of desolation. His noble collection of exotic plants, unmatched in Asia save in the Company's garden, was gone. His scientific arrangement of orders and families was obliterated. It seemed as if the fine barren sand of the mountain torrent would make the paradise a desert for ever. The venerable botanist was wounded in his keenest part, but he lost not an hour in issuing orders and writing off for new supplies of specimens and seeds, which years after made the place as lovely if not so precious, as before. He thus wrote to Dr. Ryland:—