THE FAMINE IN SOUTH INDIA.
THEFamine in Southern India is even more serious than we believed, so serious that grave blame may attach to the authorities of the Southern Presidencies for their con- cealment of the facts. They must have known what was coming for at least six months, and should not have allowed the danger to be sprung like a mine upon the Imperial Government, or have given way to the preposterous order directing them to swell by their personal attendance the splendour of the Delhi ceremonial. According to the latest accounts, which include a despatch from Lord Carnarvon, long telegrams to the Times, and a couple of letters to the Standard from a traveller in two of the stricken districts, a million and a quarter of persons,—we believe, indeed, we may say a million and a half,—have been driven from their homes by direct famine, and are herding round the relief centres for the sake of wages, estimated on the average at 4d. a day, just enough, when women and children are taken into the account, to keep them supplied with food. This number is daily in- creasing, until Lord Carnarvon calculates that in British terri- tory alone twenty-three millions of persons—the population of England and Wales—living on a territory the size of France, are afflicted by the famine, and that in April five millions of these people will be dependent upon the State alms or State wages paid for almost nominal labour. We say nominal, because unless they are set to digging vast reservoir-tanks, a work which natives thoroughly understand, there are not sufficient engineers to direct, far less to supervise the labour of so vast a multitude towards any permanent result. The maintenance of such a nation of paupers is a frightful task ; it must be continued for five months at least, by official confession, and for seven if the animals perish; and it will be aggravated by a vast outflow from some of the Native States. Indeed, though we are most anxious to avoid the slightest use of rhetoric, believing, from our experience in the last famine, that it tends to harden rather than to move the hearts of Englishmen, we should do wrong in concealing the possibility that the official case is understated. The Standard's accidental correspondent seems to have no wish to create a panic, and if his facts are correct, the calamity may exceed anything this generation has imagined. The " drought " is of a severity almost passing belief. He represents the very fruit-trees as burnt up, and the herbage on the banks of the rivers as withered away, and we need not tell Anglo-Indians what that means. There is a possibility that ten millions of people, and a moral certainty that five millions of people will be thrown upon the revenue for the means of support, and the Government of India in an official despatch already estimates its expenditure—not its losses—at £6,500,000. We need not wonder that under these circumstances men of great influence and capacity, including, if a hint in the Times is correct, perhaps the ablest officer now in India, Sir John Strachey, the Finance Minister, should shrink from the task which menaces them, and argue boldly that it is one which no Government can undertake, and that the people must be regarded as stricken with a calamity like earthquake or the plague, and left to fight it out for themselves. If they die, they die. They die always at the rate of two millions a year, and we can no more arrest the sudden destruction than we can the destruction always going on. It would be very easy to denounce this view, but it is one seriously held by grave and experienced men, who are by no means inhuman ; it is supported by considerations of finance of a most serious and indeed terrifying kind, and we shall do our readers more service by stating the " hard " view as honestly and clearly as we can, and then the answers which, in our judgment at least, overbalance it altogether. Those who argue for the abstinence of the State from in- terference with famines declare, in the first place, that we are fighting a law of nature. Our rule, with its stern, persevering pressure, arrests or terminates the causes which formerly thinned out the population of India. Wars have ceased there. Infanticide has ended as a regular cause of death. Wilder- nesses have been filled with people. Epidemics apparently as beyond our control as the tides have, to all human perception, died away before our advance, till in vast cloacce pentium like Calcutta and Madras, with cholera and typhoid ever present, a grand destructive epidemic, sweeping down the population like a storm-wave, has never yet occurred. Industry has been set free, thereby increasing all men's health ; and the people, relieved of terror, of outrage, and of plague, have multiplied like rabbits, till they press sharply, not on the means of sub- sistence, but on the means of subsistence whenever the local harvests are lost for two consecutive years. As that condition of affairs implies an under-fed multitude liable to degeneracy, Nature interferes, and thins them down till the survival of the strongest once more renews the vitality of the race. To in- terfere is injurious and even if not hopeless, is both unfair and unwise. It is unfair because, as we draw our means from the people, we are compelled, if we relieve famine, to fine the provident for the benefit of the improvident, and to rob the peasant who leads a life of toil and thrift, involving endless self-sacrifice, in order DO protect classes who are as thriftless as animals, and scarcely of more value to mankind. It is unwise, because if we go on relieving the burden will become too great, the mighty task of governing India must be given up, and the permanent welfare of two hundred millions of mankind will be sacrificed, in order that the unthrifty among them may not die a little sooner than they otherwise would. The argument of expediency, that a Poor-law prevents Revolution, though true in England, is false in Asia, for there the multitude accepts famine as the will of God, and neither rages at the State for not feeding it, nor is grateful to the State for keeping it alive. Starvation, even when traceable, as it may have been in the in- stance of Bundelcund, to the indirect action of the State, has never produced insurrection, and the people of Bengal no more hate the English because Vansittart's famine occurred in their day, than they will love the English because they arrested certain hundreds of thousands of deaths lately in Behar. What they will do is to resent most bitterly and permanently the new taxation which our Poor Law will ultimately compel us to inflict.
We believe we have stated the case most fairly, and we certainly are most painfully open to its force. On points even we see no complete answer to the harder party. For example, we would, harsh as the opinion may seem, accept no respon- sibility for the Native States. We do not tax them and do not govern them, and it is not just to insist on our subjects feeding their subjects against their will. No Native Parlia- ment would vote them a shilling, nor ought we. And though we say it most reluctantly, we do not feel so confident as we did two years since about house-to-house relief. That was a policy of benevolence rather than of duty. We greatly fear it may be wise to keep up as a principle the Indian labour-test, to give no money save where the distress is so extreme that the bonds of Oriental society loosen, and the peasant and his family break up their home, to encounter the misery of life at the relief centres. But of the general duty of affording the means of subsistence to all who will endure that test we still entertain no doubt whatever. If it is our rule which over- peoples India—and we must deny it, while population is still so unequally distributed—we are directly responsible for that sad consequence. If we are not so responsible, then the claim on us is precisely the same as the claim for public works, for education, for all expenditure intended only to civilise and improve, only much stronger in degree. It is folly to say we ought to spend millions on education, on rapid communications, or on sanitary arrangements, and refuse the millions required to keep the people alive. If we have an obligation in the one case, we have a deeper one in the other. Why spend, as we do spend, millions to prevent suffering, when we allow the one suffering which human beings dread so keenly, that they accept lives of monotonous toil to avert it, to consume them in millions f Starvation is not death, it is death by torture ; and if the State is not bound to prevent death by torture, what beneficent obligation has it at all f We know and recognise most fully that the State is only the aggregation of taxpayers, but surely the whole principle of modern govern- ment is that the aggregation of taxpayers can do, and ought to do, what the individual taxpayer cannot do. To say that the native would not do it if free, besides not being true, for he would do it for his own commune, is merely to say that we are to govern as natives would govern, and have no moral claim to be in India at all. They would govern on their own principles a great deal better than we can, and if we accept their principles, we are, at the very best, insolent intruders. More- over, the State in Southern India is, in the most direct sense of the word, the universal landlord. For centuries on end it compels its tenants to give it a third of their produce. Is it fair to do that, and then when a calamity like a continued drought occurs coolly decline to acknowledge any reciprocal obligation I We think that line of action very nearly infamous in a Scotch landlord, why is it so right in the greatest English landlord in the world I To say that in relieving the people we demoralise them is untrue, as least as long as the present test is kept up, and the native compelled to bring his wife and children to herd in vast camps, practically without shelter, along the lines of railway and canal earthworks. Nor is it more true to say that we have not the means of relief. We have the means. We can raise ten millions without seriously embarrassing the estate. No doubt, if the difficulty recurs frequently, we could not go on indefinitely adding to the Debt, but what stops us from doing what we ought to have done twenty years ago, and setting aside, say, two millions a year, for the steady reduction, in ordinary years, of the burden which, in extraordinary years, years of war, famine, or plague, it is our duty to increase? It is, we admit, of no use order- ing the Indian Government not to spend the last penny it has, for it will spend it ; but order it by Act of Parliament to remit two millions a year to the Commissioners for the reduc- tion of the National Debt, and instruct them to pay off Indian Debt with it, and who doubts that the order would be obeyed ? It would be obeyed even if we had to make experiments con- sidered monstrous in India and indispensable everywhere else, —to increase the spirit duties till it cost a day's work to get drunk, or to sell by auction in each " pergunnah " the right of establishing a tobacco-shop. If " impossibility " is proved, of course cadit qutestio, and the people must die of hunger; but until it is proved, we must maintain that the State is as much bound to prevent great famines as to prevent private war, or highway robbery, or the next generation from growing up in ignorance. We are " hard " enough surely when we say we would not destroy or imperil the Empire to prevent a famine, but we are far enough from that point yet, and till we reach it, our duty is clear enough for Parliament to enforce.
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