India, Old and New eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 367 pages of information about India, Old and New.

India, Old and New eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 367 pages of information about India, Old and New.
added large new tracts of hitherto barren wastes to the cultivable area of the country, and an elaborate machinery of precautionary measures and relief works was created to mitigate the hardships of periodical famines unavoidable in regions where a predominantly agricultural population is largely dependent for existence on the varying abundance or shortage of the seasonal rainfalls.  The incidence and methods of collection of the land-tax, the backbone of Indian revenue, were carefully corrected and perfected, and the burden of taxation readjusted and on the whole lightened.  Those were the days of laisser-faire, laisser-aller at home, and it was not deemed to be part of the duties of government to give any special protection to Indian commerce, whilst the operation of free trade principles in India checked the industrial development of the country.  Nevertheless the internal and external trade of India expanded continually, and the cotton mills in Western India, and the jute mills in Calcutta, as well as the opening up of coal mines in Bengal and of gold mines in Southern India showed how great were the natural resources of the peninsula still awaiting development; and under Lord Curzon’s administration, which reached during the first years of the present century the high-water mark of efficiency, a department was created to deal specially with commerce and industry.  In spite of several famines of unusual intensity and of the appearance in India in 1896 of a new scourge in the shape of the bubonic plague, which has carried off since then over eight million people, the population increased by leaps and bounds, and the census of 1901 showed it to have reached in our Indian Empire the huge figure of nearly 300,000,000—­which it has since then exceeded by another 20,000,000—­or about a fifth of the estimated population of the whole globe.  It had risen since the first census officially recorded in 1871 by nearly 30 per cent—­no mean evidence that fifty years of peaceful and efficient administration had produced an increased sense of welfare and confidence.

The great bulk of the population, mostly a simple and ignorant peasantry whose horizon does not extend beyond their own village and the fields that surround it, accepted with more or less conscious gratitude the material benefits conferred upon them by alien rulers with whom they were seldom brought into actual contact save through the occasional presence of a District officer on tour, almost invariably humane and kindly and anxious to do even-handed justice to all.  Another class of Indians, chiefly dwellers in large cities, infinitesimally small numerically but constantly increasing in numbers and still more rapidly in activity and influence, saw, however, in an autocratic form of government, of which it even questioned the efficiency, an insurmountable barrier to the aspirations which Western education had taught it to entertain.  The list of graduates from Indian Universities lengthened every year, the number of

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
India, Old and New from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.