Such being the mode of collecting the revenue, we may now look to its distribution. Under the native princes it was, to a great extent, locally-expended, whereas, under the new system, all the collections by government or by individuals tended to Calcutta, to be there disposed of. Thence no inconsiderable portion of it passed to England, and thus was established a perpetual drain that certainly could not be estimated at less than four millions of pounds sterling per annum, and cannot be placed, in the last century, at less than four hundred millions of pounds, or two thousand millions of dollars.
The difference between an absentee landlord expending at a distance all his rents, and a resident one distributing it again among his tenants in exchange for services, and the difference in the value of the products of the land resulting from proximity to market, are so well exhibited in the following passage from a recent work on India, that the reader cannot fail to profit by its perusal:—
"The great part of the wheat, grain, and other exportable land produce which the people consume, as far as we have yet come, is drawn from our Nerbudda districts, and those of Malwa which border upon them; and par consequent, the price has been rapidly increasing as we recede from them in our advance northward. Were the soil of those Nerbudda districts, situated as they are at such a distance from any great market for their agricultural products, as bad as it is in the parts of Bundelcund that I came over, no net surplus revenue could possibly be drawn from them in the present state of arts and industry. The high prices paid here for land produce, arising from the necessity of drawing a great part of what is consumed from such distant lands, enables the Rajahs of these Bundelcund states to draw the large revenue they do. These chiefs expend the whole of their revenue in the maintenance of public establishments of one kind or other; and as the essential articles of subsistence, wheat and grain, &c., which are produced in their own districts, or those immediately around them, are not sufficient for the supply of these establishments, they must draw them from distant territories. All this produce is brought on the backs of bullocks, because there is no road from the districts whence they obtain it, over which a wheeled carriage can be drawn with safety; and as this mode of transit is very expensive, the price of the produce, when it reaches the capitals, around which these local establishments are concentrated, becomes very high. They must pay a price equal to the collective cost of purchasing and bringing this substance from the most distant districts, to which they are at any time obliged to have recourse for a supply, or they will not be supplied; and as there cannot be two prices for the same thing in the same market, the wheat and grain produced in the neighbourhood of one of these Bundelcund capitals, fetch as high a price there as that brought from the most remote districts on the banks of the Nerbudda river; while it costs comparatively nothing to bring it from the former lands to the markets. Such lands, in consequence, yield a rate of rent much greater compared with their natural powers of fertility than those of the remotest districts whence produce is drawn for these markets or capitals; and as all the lands are the property of the Rajahs, they draw all these rents as revenue.
"Were we to take this revenue, which the Rajahs now enjoy, in tribute for the maintenance of public establishments concentrated at distant seats, all these local establishments would of course be at once disbanded; and all the effectual demand which they afford for the raw agricultural produce of distant districts would cease. The price of the produce would diminish in proportion; and with it the value of the lands of the districts around such capitals. Hence the folly of conquerors and paramount powers, from the days of the Greeks and Romans down to those of Lord Hastings and Sir John Malcolm, who were all bad political economists, supposing that conquered and ceded territories could always be made to yield to a foreign state the same amount of gross revenue they had paid to their domestic government, whatever their situation with reference to the markets for their produce—whatever the state of their arts and their industry—and whatever the character and extent of the local establishments maintained out of it. The settlements of the land revenue in all the territories acquired in central India during the Mahratta war, which ended, in 1817, were made upon the supposition, that the lands would continue to pay the same rate of rent under the new, as they had paid under the old government, uninfluenced by the diminution of all local establishments, civil and military, to one-tenth of what they had been; that, under the new order of things, all the waste lands must be brought into tillage; and be able to pay as high a rate of rent as before tillage; and, consequently, that the aggregate available net revenue must greatly and rapidly increase! Those who had the making of the settlements, and the governing of these new territories, did not consider that the diminution of every establishment was the removal of a market—of an effectual demand for land produce; and that when all the waste lands should be brought into tillage, the whole would deteriorate in fertility, from the want of fallows, under the prevailing system of agriculture, which afforded the lands no other means of renovation from over cropping. The settlements of the land revenue which were made throughout our new acquisitions upon these fallacious assumptions, of course failed. During a series of quinquennial settlements, the assessment has been everywhere gradually reduced to about two-thirds of what it was when our rule began; and to less than one-half of what Sir John Malcolm, and all the other local authorities, and even the worthy Marquis of Hastings himself, under the influence of their opinions, expected it would be. The land revenues of the native princes of central India, who reduced their public establishments, which the new order of things seemed to render useless, and thereby diminished their only markets for the raw produce of their lands, have been everywhere falling off in the same proportion; and scarcely one of them now draws two-thirds of the income he drew from the same lands in 1817.
"There are in the valley of the Nerbudda, districts that yield a great deal more produce every year than either Orcha, Jansee, or Duteea; and yet, from the want of the same domestic markets, they do not yield one-fourth of the amount of land revenue. The lands are, however, rated equally high to the assessment, in proportion to their value to the farmers and cultivators. To enable them to yield a larger revenue to government, they require to have larger establishments as markets for land produce. These establishments may be either public, and paid by government, or they may be private, as manufactories, by which the land produce of these districts would be consumed by people employed in investing the value of their labour in commodities suited to the demand of distant markets, and more valuable than land produce in proportion to their weight and bulk. These are the establishments which government should exert itself to introduce and foster, since the valley of the Nerbudda, in addition to a soil exceedingly fertile, has in its whole line, from its source to its embouchure, rich beds of coal reposing for the use of future generations, under the sandstone of the Sathpore and Vindhya ranges; and beds no less rich of very fine iron. These advantages have not yet been justly appreciated; but they will be so by and by."[79]
From the concluding lines of this extract the reader will see that India is abundantly supplied with fuel and iron ore, and that if she has not good machinery, the deficiency is not chargeable to nature. At the close of the last century cotton abounded, and to so great an extent was the labour of men, women, and children applied to its conversion into cloth, that, even with their imperfect machinery, they not only supplied the home demand for the beautiful tissues of Dacca and the coarse products of Western India, but they exported to other parts of the world no less than 200,000,000 of pieces per annum.[80] Exchanges with every part of the world were so greatly in their favour that a rupee which would now sell for but 1s. 10d. or 44 cents, was then worth 2s. 8d. or 64 cents. The Company had a monopoly of collecting taxes in India, but in return it preserved to the people the control of their domestic market, by aid of which they were enabled to convert their rice, their salt, and their cotton, into cloth that could be cheaply carried to the most remote parts of the world. Such protection was needed, because while England prohibited the export of even a single collier who might instruct the people of India in the mode of mining coal—of a steam engine to pump water or raise coal, or a mechanic who could make one—of a worker in iron who might smelt the ore—of a spinning-jenny or power-loom, or of an artisan who could give instruction in the use of such machines—and thus systematically prevented them from keeping pace with improvement in the rest of the world,—she at the same time imposed very heavy duties on the produce of Indian looms received in England. The day was at hand, however, when that protection was to disappear. The Company did not, it was said, export sufficiently largely of the produce of British industry, and in 1813 the trade to India was thrown open—but the restriction on the export of machinery and artisans was maintained in full force; and thus were the poor and ignorant people of that country exposed to "unlimited competition," with a people possessed of machinery ten times more effective than their own, while not only by law deprived of the power to purchase machinery, but also of the power of competing in the British market with the produce of British looms. Further than this, every loom in India, and every machine calculated to aid the labourer, was subject to a tax that increased with every increase in the industry of its owner, and in many cases absorbed the whole profit derived from its use.[81] Such were the circumstances under which the poor Hindoo was called upon to encounter, unprotected, the "unlimited competition" of foreigners in his own market. It was freedom of trade all on one side. Four years after, the export of cottons from Bengal still amounted to £1,659,994,[82] but ten years later it had declined to £285,121; and at the end of twenty years we find a whole year pass by without the export of a single piece of cotton cloth from Calcutta, the whole of the immense trade that existed but half a century since having disappeared. What were the measures used for the accomplishment of the work of destroying a manufacture that gave employment and food to so many millions of the poor people of the country, will be seen on a perusal of the following memorial, which shows that while India was denied machinery, and also denied access to the British market, she was forced to receive British cottons free of all duty:—
"Petition of Natives of Bengal, relative to Duties on Cotton and Silk.
"Calcutta, 1st Sept. 1831.
"To the Right Honourable the Lords of His Majesty's Privy Council for
Trade, &c.
"The humble Petition of the undersigned Manufacturers and Dealers in
Cotton and Silk Piece Goods, the fabrics of Bengal;