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