they fail in one district or province, the deficiency is very easily supplied to a people who have equivalents to give for the produce of another.  The sea, navigable rivers, fine roads, all are open and ready at all times for the transport of the superabundance of one quarter to supply the deficiencies of another.  In India, the reverse of all this is unhappily to be found; more than three-fourths of the whole population are engaged in the cultivation of the land, and depend upon its annual returns for subsistence.[16] The farmers and cultivators have none of their stock equal in value to more than half the amount of the annual rent of their lands.[17] They have a great variety of crops; but all are exposed to the same accidents, and commonly fail at the same time.  The autumn crops are sown in June and July, and ripen in October and November; and, if seasonable showers do not fall during July, August, and September, all fail.  The spring crops are sown in October and November, and ripen in March; and, if seasonable showers do not happen to fall during December or January, all, save what are artificially irrigated, fail.[18] If they fail in one district or province, the people have few equivalents to offer for a supply of land produce from any other.  Their roads are scarcely anywhere passable for wheeled carriages at any season, and nowhere at all seasons—­they have nowhere a navigable canal, and only in one line a navigable river.

Their land produce is conveyed upon the backs of bullocks, that move at the rate of six or eight miles a day, and add one hundred per cent. to the cost of every hundred miles they carry it in the best seasons, and more than two hundred in the worst.[19] What in Europe is felt merely as a dearth, becomes in India, under all these disadvantages, a scarcity, and what is there a scarcity becomes here a famine.  Tens of thousands die here of starvation, under calamities of season, which in Europe would involve little of suffering to any class.  Here man does everything, and he must have his daily food or starve.  In England machinery does more than three-fourths of the collective work of society in the production, preparation, and distribution of man’s physical enjoyments, and it stands in no need of this daily food to sustain its powers; they are independent of the seasons; the water, fire, air, and other elemental powers which they require to render them subservient to our use are always available in abundance.

This machinery is the great assistant of the present generation, provided for us by the wisdom and industry of the past; wanting no food itself, it can always provide its proprietors with the means of purchasing what they require from other countries, when the harvests of their own fail.  When calamities of season deprive men of employment for a time in tillage, they can, in England, commonly find it in other branches of industry, because agricultural industry forms so small