"I here beheld, for the first time, a class of beings of whom we have heard much, and for whom I have felt considerable interest. I refer to the Coolies imported by the British government to take the place of the faineant negroes, when the apprenticeship system was abolished. Those that I saw were wandering about the streets, dressed rather tastefully, but always meanly, and usually carrying over their shoulder a sort of chiffonier's sack, in which they threw whatever refuse stuff they found in the streets or received as charity. Their figures are generally superb; and their Eastern costume, to which they adhere as far as their poverty will permit of any clothing, sets off their lithe and graceful forms to great advantage. Their faces are almost uniformly of the finest classic mould, and illuminated by pairs of those dark swimming and propitiatory eyes, which exhaust the language of tenderness and passion at a glance.
"But they are the most inveterate mendicants on the island. It is said that those brought from the interior of India are faithful and efficient workmen, while those from Calcutta and its vicinity are good for nothing. Those that were prowling about the streets of Spanish-town and Kingston, I presume, were of the latter class, for there is not a planter on the island, it is said, from whom it would be more difficult to get any work than from one of these. They subsist by begging altogether: they are not vicious, nor intemperate, nor troublesome particularly, except as beggars. In that calling they have a pertinacity before which a Northern mendicant would grow pale. They will not be denied. They will stand perfectly still and look through a window from the street for a quarter of an hour, if not driven away, with their imploring eyes fixed upon you, like a stricken deer, without saying a word or moving a muscle. They act as if it were no disgrace for them to beg, as if the least indemnification which they are entitled to expect, for the outrage perpetrated upon them in bringing them from their distant homes to this strange island, is a daily supply of their few and cheap necessities, as they call for them.
"I confess that their begging did not leave upon my mind the impression produced by ordinary mendicancy. They do not look as if they ought to work. I never saw one smile, and though they showed no positive suffering, I never saw one look happy. Each face seemed to be constantly telling the unhappy story of their woes, and like fragments of a broken mirror, each reflecting in all its hateful proportions the national outrage of which they are the victims."[117]
The slave trade has taken a new form, the mild and gentle Hindoo having taken the place of the barbarous and fierce African; and this trade is likely to continue so long as it shall be held to be the chief object of the government of a Christian people to secure to its people cheap cotton and sugar, without regard to the destruction of life of which that cheapness is the cause. The people of England send to India missionary priests and bishops, but they obtain few converts; nor can it ever be otherwise under a system which tends to destroy the power of association, and thus prevents that diversification of employments that is indispensable to the improvement of physical, moral, intellectual, or political condition. May we not hope that at no very distant day they will arrive at the conclusion that such association is as necessary to the Hindoo as they know it to be to themselves, and that if they desire success in their attempts to bring the followers of Mohammed, or of Brahma, to an appreciation of the doctrines of Christ, they must show that their practice and their teachings are in some degree in harmony with each other? When that day shall come they will be seen endeavouring to remedy the evil they have caused, and permitting the poor Hindoo to obtain establishments in which labour may be combined for the production of iron and of machinery, by aid of which the native cotton may be twisted in the neighbourhood in which it is produced, thus enabling the now unhappy cultivator to exchange directly with his food-producing neighbour, relieved from the necessity for sending his products to a distance, to be brought back again in the form of yarn or cloth, at fifteen or twenty times the price at which he sold it in the form of cotton. That time arrived, they will appreciate the sound good sense contained in the following remarks of Colonel Sleeman:—
"If we had any great establishment of this sort in which Christians could find employment, and the means of religious and secular instruction, thousands of converts would soon flock to them; and they would become vast sources of future improvement in industry, social comfort, municipal institutions, and religion. What chiefly prevents the spread of Christianity in India is the dread of exclusion from caste and all its privileges; and the utter hopelessness of their ever finding any respectable circle of society of the adopted religion, which converts, or would be converts to Christianity, now everywhere feel. Form such circles for them—make the members of these circles happy in the exertion of honest and independent industry—let those who rise to eminence in them feel that they are considered as respectable and as important in the social system as the servants of government, and converts will flock around you from all parts, and from all classes of the Hindoo community. * * * I am persuaded that a dozen such establishments as that of Mr. Thomas Ashton, of Hyde, as described by a physician of Manchester, and noticed in Mr. Baines's admirable work on the Cotton Manufactures of Great Britain, (page 447,) would do more in the way of conversion among the people of India than has ever yet been done by all the religious establishments, or ever will be done by them without some such aid."—Vol. ii. 164.
That there is a steady increase in the tendency toward personal servitude, or slavery, in India, no one can doubt who will study carefully the books on that country; and it may not be amiss to inquire on whom rests the responsibility for this state of things. By several of the persons that have been quoted, Messrs. Thompson, Bright, and others, it is charged upon the Company; but none that read the works of Messrs. Campbell and Sleeman can hesitate to believe that the direction is now animated by a serious desire to improve the condition of its poor subjects. Unfortunately, however, the Company is nearly in the condition of the land-holders of Jamaica, and is itself tending toward ruin, because its subjects are limited to agriculture, and because they receive so small a portion of the value of their very small quantity of products. Now, as in the days of Joshua Gee, the largest portion of that value remains in England, whose people eat cheap sugar while its producer starves in India. Cheap sugar and cheap cotton are obtained by the sacrifice of the interests of a great nation; and while the policy of England shall continue to look to driving the women and children of India to the labours of the field, and the men to the raising of sugar in the Mauritius, the soil must continue to grow poorer, the people must become more and more enslaved, and the government must find itself more and more dependent for revenue on the power to poison the people of China; and therefore will it be seen that however good may be the intentions of the gentlemen charged with the duties of government, they must find themselves more and more compelled to grind the poor ryot in the hope of obtaining revenue.
CHAPTER XIII.
HOW SLAVERY GROWS IN IRELAND AND SCOTLAND.
The government which followed the completion of the Revolution of 1688, pledged itself to discountenance the woollen manufacture of Ireland, with a view to compel the export of raw wool to England, whence its exportation to foreign countries was prohibited; the effect of which was, of course, to enable the English manufacturer to purchase it at his own price. From that period forward we find numerous regulations as to the ports from which alone woollen yarn or cloth might go to England, and the ports of the latter through which it might come; while no effort was spared to induce the people of Ireland to abandon woollens and take to flax. Laws were passed prohibiting the export of Irish cloth and glass to the colonies. By other laws Irish ships were deprived of the benefit of the navigation laws. The fisheries were closed against them. No sugar could be imported from any place but Great Britain, and no drawback was allowed on its exportation to Ireland; and thus was the latter compelled to pay a tax for the support of the British government, while maintaining its own. All other colonial produce was required to be carried first to England, after which it might be shipped to Ireland; and as Irish shipping was excluded from the advantages of the navigation laws, it followed that the voyage of importation was to be made in British ships, manned by British seamen, and owned by British merchants, who were thus authorized to tax the people of Ireland for doing their work, while a large portion of the Irish people were themselves unemployed.
While thus prohibiting them from applying themselves to manufactures or trade, every inducement was held out to them to confine themselves to the production of commodities required by the English manufacturers, and wool, hemp, and flax were admitted into England free of duty. We see thus that the system of that day in reference to Ireland looked to limiting the people of that country, as it limited the slaves of Jamaica, and now limits the people of Hindostan, to agriculture alone, and thus depriving the men, the women, and the children of all employment except the labour of the field, and of all opportunity for intellectual improvement, such as elsewhere results from that association which necessarily accompanies improvement in the mechanic arts.