[23] History of Civilization. Vol. I., Chap. 2. In this chapter Buckle has collected a great deal of evidence of the oppression and degradation of the people of India from the most remote times, a condition which, blinded by the Malthusian doctrine, he has accepted and made the cornerstone of his theory of the development of civilization, he attributes to the ease with which food can there be produced.
[24] Indian Recreations. By Rev. Wm. Tennant. London, 1804. Vol. I., Sec. XXXIX.
[25] Miss Nightingale (The People of India, in “Nineteenth Century” for August, 1878) gives instances, which she says represent millions of cases, of the state of peonage to which the cultivators of Southern India have been reduced through the facilities afforded by the Civil Courts to the frauds and oppressions of money lenders and minor native officials. “Our Civil Courts are regarded as institutions for enabling the rich to grind the faces of the poor, and many are fain to seek a refuge from their jurisdiction within native territory,” says Sir David Wedderburn, in an article on Protected Princes in India, in a previous (July) number of the same magazine, in which he also gives a native State, where taxation is comparatively light, as an instance of the most prosperous population of India.
[26] See articles in “Nineteenth Century” for October, 1878, and March, 1879.
[27] Prof. Fawcett, in a recent article on the Proposed Loans to India, calls attentions to such items as £1,200 for outfit and passage of a member of the Governor General’s Council; £2,450 for outfit and passage of Bishops of Calcutta and Bombay.
[28] Florence Nightingale says 100 per cent. is common, and even then the cultivator is robbed in ways which she illustrates. It is hardly necessary to say that these rates, like those of the pawnbroker, are not interest in the economic sense of the term.
[29] The seat of recent famine in China was not the most thickly settled districts.
[30] Principles of Political Economy, Book I., Chap. XIII., Sec. 2.
[31] The rate up to 1860 was 35 per cent. each decade.
[32] In speaking of the value of land I use and shall use the words as referring to the value of the bare land. When I wish to speak of the value of land and improvements I shall use those words.