This is the last worst evil which English administration has brought upon the Indian peasantry, and when one considers all their poverty and the depth of their increasing liabilities one finds it difficult to have patience with the optimist views of men like Sir John Strachey, who see all that they have created in India and find it very good. That we have done much that is of advantage to agricultural India no one will deny, but have we not done it still more harm? We have given the ryot security from death by violence, but we have probably increased his danger of death by starvation. This is a doubt which is beginning to assert itself vividly in the minds of thoughtful Indians, and it is one that Englishmen too will do well, before it is too late, to entertain.
Admitting, then, the general fact of India’s growing agricultural poverty, what should be our remedy? I confess to being a little sceptical of the legislative nostrums partially applied and proposed to be applied by the Imperial Government to a patient manifestly in want of a complete change of treatment and a long period of financial rest. Nor do I see my way to accepting such alleviations as the Bengal Rent Bill, or the founding of agricultural banks, or even local self-government, though all these things may be good, as a sufficient check to the evils fast accumulating. At best they may succeed in shifting the burdens of the people a little on this side or on that. They will not lighten them really by a single pennyweight, nor restore the confidence of the people in the humane intentions of the Government, nor put off even for a year the trouble which on the present lines of policy must certainly ensue. I do not believe in legislative remedies for the starvation of the ryot or in the possibility of relieving his position except at the sacrifice of interests too strongly represented both at Calcutta and in London to be assailed with any chance of success. Finance, not legislature, is the cause of all the evil; and until that is put upon a sound footing, the rest is of no real value.
When I was at Calcutta, I constantly discussed this matter with the leading native economists, and I know, too, their ideas in other cities; and at Bombay it formed the chief subject of attention at the meeting specially convened to instruct me with regard to the wants of the Presidency. I know, therefore, what Indians think about Indian finance, and I believe their reasoning is sound. According to these, the vice of the Calcutta budgets lies in the fact that, whereas in every other country the finance Minister looks solely to the interests of the country he serves, in India he looks principally to the interests, not of India, but of England. Two English interests have to be served first, before any attention can be paid to the necessities of those who supply the revenue. First, the Anglo-Indian Administration must be maintained in full employment, in pay, allowances, and according to native ideas in luxuries; and secondly, every kind of advantage must be given to English trade. It is unnecessary for me to argue out the question of the excessive costliness of the civil and military establishments of India. These are notorious in the world as surpassing those of all other countries to which they can be fairly compared in the present time or the past. And, although they may also lay claim to be the most efficient, it does not prevent them from being a vast financial failure.
It is a perpetual astonishment to travellers to note the scale of living of every Englishman employed in India, in however mean a capacity. The enormous palaces of governors and lieutenant-governors, their country houses, their residences in the hills, their banquets and entertainments, their retinues of servants, their carriages and horses, their special trains on their journeyings, their tents, their armies of retainers and camp followers—these are only samples of the universal profusion; an equally noble hospitality reigns in every bungalow on the plains; and endless dinners of imported delicacies, with libations of imported wines, tempt night after night the inhabitants of the most solitary stations to forget the dismal fact that they are in Asia and far from their own land. No Collector’s wife will wear an article of Indian manufacture to save her soul from perdition, and all her furniture, even to her carpets, must be of English make.
I remember early in my travels having the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality of a country station-master on the Indian Peninsular Railway, and being astonished to find him living in better style, and in a house larger than most English rectories, while we were driven out after luncheon by his lady in a charming phaeton drawn by a pair of stepping ponies. There was no reason, however, for astonishment. He lived as all Englishmen in India do, that is to say, about five times as well as in his rank of life he possibly could do at home, and he was worthy of his good fortune. Only it must not be supposed that the natives starving outside are at all proportionately the better for the brave living of their rulers. I, an English traveller, profited as a guest, and I am half ashamed to say how sumptuously I fared. But the poor ryot was, in fact, my host—not the other—for it was he whose labour fed me, though he did not share the meal.
I say, a traveller cannot fail to be impressed, and, if he have any powers of reflection, disagreeably so, with this profusion. There is surely no country in the world where in the midst of such starvation there is so much waste; certainly none where the expense of it all is borne so wholly and directly by the poor. I wonder whether any one has calculated the number of miles of macadamized road in the various Anglo-Indian cantonments, not a yard of which has ever served any purpose beyond that of enabling the officers’ wives to pay each other visits in their carriages? I wonder whether any one has calculated the numbers of absolutely useless clock towers and Gothic memorials erected by Sir Richard Temples to Sir Bartle Freres, and Sir Bartle Freres to Sir Richard Temples in the various Presidencies? I wonder whether any one has calculated how many hogsheads of champagne the water-drinking ryot has paid for in the last half-century as an unaccounted item of his yearly budget? These things strike the imagination of the traveller. They do not strike the resident in India. They are not arguments, but impressions; and yet they mean something.
If, however, the ryot must maintain the luxury of his English administrators before his own wants can be supplied, so, too, must he maintain the English trader to the ruin of his own trade. I am repeating native arguments when I complain that the necessity of considering the advantage of Manchester capitalists stands seriously in the way of an honest framer of the Indian Budget, and that, whereas the Finance Minister of every English colony is at liberty to raise money by import duties and generally does so, the Indian Minister is precluded from that source of revenue. I have argued the matter of Free Trade out with the native economists, and they seem to me perfectly to understand it. They know that as applied to England, a manufacturing country which imports its food, Free Trade is considered a necessity of financial life. But they deny that the doctrine applies with equal cogency to India. India, they say, is a produce-exporting country like the United States or the Australian colonies. It imports no single article of prime necessity, iron and coal perhaps excepted, and the cotton and other manufactured goods consumed there are luxuries only used by the rich, and especially by the Europeans. It is certain that no ryot in all India wears any cotton clothing of foreign make, or has his means of existence made one wit cheaper for him by Free Trade. Import duties, then, would tax the rich only, and the rich in India are hardly taxed at all. Yet, because Free Trade is of advantage to England, India must forgo her own advantage. This, the natives say, may be a political necessity, but it is not ruling India financially for India’s good. I confess I do not see where the flaw in their argument lies.
They say, moreover, that Free Trade in manufactured goods has destroyed the native industries and given nothing in their stead. When the hand-looms a hundred years ago were ruined in the English counties, the rural population migrated to the towns and found work in the great factories. But in India this has hardly at all happened. The ryot who used to weave is left without labour of any sort during his spare time, for distances are great and there is little demand for labour in the towns, and he remains of necessity idle, so that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a present of his labour has been made by Anglo-Indian finance to his English rival. The doctrine of advantage from buying in the cheapest market does not help him, for he buys nothing cheaper; and if the English manufacturer shares the advantage with any one in India, it is with the town consumer, not with the ryot. Every native economist, therefore, whom I have spoken with on the subject, would impose import duties on manufactured articles except machinery. Thus, they say, a tax would be levied upon the rich; and if it acted as a protection and stimulus to home manufactures, why, so much the better. With protection, factories could be established in the Indian country towns in which the surplus labour of the ryot would find employment, and so the injury done him be in part redressed. If this doctrine is unsound, I shall be glad to hear in what manner; for at present it seems to me to have not a little reason.[15]
I was surprised to find, in an assemblage mainly of rich men, that most of those who composed the Bombay meeting already alluded to were in favour of some form of income tax. Not that they altogether denied its general unpopularity, but from the necessity they recognized of taxing wealth. They said that in one shape or other incomes had always till recently been taxed in India, and that, though there were great difficulties in the way of collecting any sort of income tax fairly, it had always been accepted. The present licence tax, they assured me, was much more hateful and far less profitable than any true tax on income, and seemed framed on purpose to distribute its pressure most unfairly. It seemed hardly credible, but according to present regulations the keeper of a small shop in the native quarter was taxed as highly for his trade as the richest English banker on ’Change; all the charge upon the latter’s income, though he might deal in millions, being twenty pounds per annum in the form of a trade licence. The present system was, in fact, only another advantage given by the framers of Indian budgets to English trade; and they assured me that the people who really prevented a proper income tax from being imposed in India were not the native tradesmen, but the English officials whose salaries would be directly touched by it. If it were possible to levy import duties and a tax on incomes, the agricultural poor might be relieved, but hardly in any other way. I offer these suggestions for what they may be considered worth.
The prime measure, however, of agricultural reform, on which all native India seems agreed, is the granting of a permanent revenue settlement to every province, such as was ninety years ago granted to Bengal, and limiting thereby the preposterous claim of the Government to all ownership in land. This right of State ownership has worked everywhere, or nearly everywhere, its full natural result of impoverishment and disaffection; and Bengal, which has been exempted from its action, has alone remained prosperous. I do not propose to argue out this great question here. But I intend to return to it on a future occasion; and it will be sufficient for me now to say, that the value placed by native opinion on a fixed revenue settlement is the cause of the strong agitation actually in progress against the Bengal Rent Bill. This measure, in spite of Lord Ripon’s immense popularity, is decidedly unpopular, and native politicians see in it a first blow struck at the prosperity of the only province which has hitherto escaped the universal drain of wealth into the Imperial coffers; nor am I without reason to believe that so it was intended, not by Lord Ripon, but by some of his advisers. At present, however, I only state the fact that a permanent settlement of the land revenue is urgently demanded by all India.[16]