THE "BANKRUPTCY OF INDIA."
[TO THS EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:1
do not know India, but on reading the article by Mr. Hyndman in the Nineteenth Century on the "Bankruptcy of India," and the reply to it in the Spectator of the 5th inst., it seems to me that the state of India is similar to that of Ireland during the first half of the present century. During that period Ireland certainly increased in wealth, and yet the peasantry—who in Ireland, as in India, are the people—were visibly growing poorer. The reason of this apparent contradiction is that popu- lation was increasing more rapidly than agricultural wealth, and it appears much more likely that the same process is going on in India now, than that the country is being drained of its wealth by taxation.
In Ireland, up to the famine of 1847, as in the greater part of India from the suppression of the Mahratta Power till now, the Government gave to the country the greatest of all blessings that a Government can give, namely, internal peace ; but it did not give what, for an agricultural people, is the first necessity after this, namely, a good system of land tenure. I am un- able to form an opinion whether Mr. Hy ndman is right that the great evil is taxation, or whether Miss Nightingale and her informants are right,—that the great evil is the power of the usurers. It is certainly the duty of the Indian Government to extend the principle of the "permanent settle- snout" of Bengal to the whole of India, thereby making the land private property, and permitting the gradual accumulation of wealth. Respecting usury, I am convinced that the only guide in legislation ought to be the public welfare, and that a creditor has no more natural right to take a peasant's cattle or seed-corn in execution, than he has to take the peasant himself and sell him
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