From all quarters we receive unimpeachable evidence that the locust system has performed its devouring work on the broadest scale in India; and that the Hindoos are the victims of conquerors, slower, indeed, in their movements, than Tamerlane or Genghis Khan, but more destructive and more criminal than either of those great barbarian invaders.
CHAPTER XII.
THE CRIME AND THE DUTY OF THE ENGLISH GOVERNMENT.
It remains to sum up the charges against the English oligarchy, and to point out the path which justice, humanity, and the age require the government to pursue. In so doing, we shall go no farther than the facts previously adduced will afford us sure ground, nor speak more harshly than our duty to our oppressed fellow-men will demand. We pity the criminal even while we pass sentence upon her.
A government originating in, and suited for, a barbarous age must necessarily be unfit for one enjoying the meridian of civilization. The arrangement of lord and serf was appropriate to the period when war was regarded as the chief employment of mankind, and when more respect was paid to the kind of blood flowing in a man's veins than to his greatness or generosity of soul. But, in the nineteenth century, war is regarded as an evil to be avoided as long as possible. Peace is the rule, and conflict the exception. Christianity has taught us, also, that the good and the great in heart and mind—wherever born, wherever bred—are the true nobility of our race. It is the sin of the English government that it works against the bright influence of the times and throws the gloomy shadow of feudalism over some of the fairest regions of the earth. It legislates for the age of William the Conqueror instead of the reign of Victoria.
The few for hereditary luxury and dominion, the many for hereditary misery and slavery, is the grand fundamental principle of the English system. For every gorgeous palace there are a thousand hovels, where even beasts should not be forced to dwell. For every lord who spends his days in drinking, gambling, hunting, horse-racing, and indulging himself in all the luxuries that money can purchase, a thousand persons, at least, must toil day and night to obtain the most wretched subsistence. In no country are the few richer than in England, and in no country are the masses more fearfully wretched. The great bulk of the property of England, both civil and ecclesiastical, is in the grasp of the aristocracy. All offices of church and state, yielding any considerable emolument, are monopolized by the lords and their nominees. The masses earn—the lords spend. The lords have all the property, but the masses pay all the taxes, and slave and starve that the taxes may be paid.
Without such a system, is it possible that there could be millions of acres of good land lying waste, and millions of paupers who dare not cultivate it?—that the workhouses could be crowded—that men, women, and children could be driven to all kinds of work, and yet by the most exhausting toil not earn enough to enable them to live decently and comfortably—that honest and industrious people could starve by the wayside, or die of disease engendered in dirty hovels—that vice and crime could be practised to an appalling extent—that whole villages could be swept away and the poor labourers either driven into the crowded cities, or to a distant land, far from kindred and friends?
The aristocrats of England are the most extensive slaveholders in the world. In England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, they have the entire labouring mass for their slaves—men, women, and children being doomed to the most grinding toil to enable their masters to live in luxurious ease. In India and the other colonies they have treated the natives as the conquered were treated in the Middle Ages. They have drained their resources, oppressed them in every way, and disposed of tribes and nations as if they had been dealing with cattle. Add the slaves of India to the slaves of the United Kingdom, and we may count them by tens of millions. These slaves are not naturally inferior to their masters. They belong to races fertile in great and good men and women. Poets, artists, philosophers, historians, statesmen, and warriors of the first magnitude in genius have sprung from these down-trodden people. They have fully proved themselves capable of enjoying the sweets of freedom. They remain slaves because their masters find it profitable, and know how to cozen and bully them into submission.