CHAPTER XI.
SLAVERY IN BRITISH INDIA.
The extensive, populous, and wealthy peninsula of Hindostan has suffered greatly from the crushing effects of the British slave system. From the foundation of the empire in India by Clive, conquest and extortion seem to have been the grand objects of the aristocratic government. There unscrupulous soldiers have fought, slaughtered, enslaved, and plundered. There younger sons, with rank, but without fortune, have filled their purses. There vast and magnificent tracts of country have been wasted with fire and sword, in punishment for the refusal of native princes to become slaves. There the fat of the land has been garnered up for the luxury of the conquerors, while famine has destroyed the people by thousands. There, indeed, has the British aristocracy displayed its most malignant propensities—rioting in robbery and bloodshed—setting all religion at defiance, while upholding the Christian standard—and earning to the full the continued execration of mankind.
In a powerful work, called "The Aristocracy of England: a History for the People, by John Hampden, Jun.," a book we commend to the people of England, we have the following passage:—
"From the hour that Clive and his coadjutors came into the discovery of the vast treasures of the native princes, whence he himself obtained, besides his jaghire of £30,000 per annum, about £300,000; and he and his fellows altogether, between 1759 and 1763, no less than £5,940,498, exclusive of this said jaghire, the cupidity of the aristocracy became excited to the highest degree; and from that period to the present, India has been one scene of flights of aristocratic locusts, of fighting, plundering, oppression, and extortion of the natives. We will not go into these things; they are fully and faithfully written in Mills's 'History of British India;' in Howitt's 'Colonization and Christianity;' and, above all, in the letters of the Honourable Frederick Shore, brother of Lord Teignmouth, a man who passed through all offices—from a clerk to that of a judge—and saw much of the system and working of things in many parts of India. He published his letters originally in the India papers, that any one on the spot might challenge their truth; and, since his death, they have been reprinted in England. The scene which that work opens up is the most extraordinary, and demands the attention of every lover of his country and his species. It fully accounts for the strange facts, that India is now drained of its wealth; that its public works, especially the tanks, which contributed by their waters to maintain its fertility, are fallen to decay; that one-third of the country is a jungle inhabited by tigers, who pay no taxes; that its people are reduced to the utmost wretchedness, and are often, when a crop fails, swept away by half a million at once by famine and its pendant, pestilence, as in 1770, and again in 1838-9. To such a degree is this reduction of the wealth and cultivation of India carried, that while others of our colonies pay taxes to the amount of a pound or thirty shillings per head, India pays only four shillings.
"At the renewal of its charter in 1834, its income was about twenty millions, its debt about forty millions. Since then its income has gradually fallen to about seventeen millions, and its debt we hear now whispered to be about seventy millions. Such have been the effects of exhausted fields and physical energies on the one hand, and of wars, especially that of Afghanistan, on the other. It requires no conjurer, much less a very profound arithmetician, to perceive that at this rate we need be under no apprehension of Russia, for a very few years will take India out of our hands by mere financial force.