Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎531r] (186/238)

399
CORRESPONDENCE, NOTES, AND NEWS.
FAMINE IN INDIA: ITS CAUSES AND EFFECTS.
Sir,
In Mr. Hare’s pamphlet on “ Famine in India: its Causes
and Effects,” published by Messrs. P. S. King and Son, Westminster,
I had hoped to find something more practical in the way of remedy
than we have hitherto seen. If we could be clear as to the causes of
famine, we should, perhaps, be led to the proper remedy.
What, then, does Mr. Hare’s indictment amount to ? Simply, I think,
that labour is always and everywhere deprived of its fair share of the
produce of labour ; and that, I think, is true not only in India, but in
England also, and still more conspicuously so in Italy and Russia, and
most other countries, except, perhaps, America. What is the whole secret
of American prosperity ? High wages and (comparative) temperance, or
“ thrift ” amongst the labouring classes, says Mr. Schwab. In England,
on the other hand, it is an elaborate and enormously expensive poor law,
which spends (or wastes) ^6,000,000 e?>ery year in the “ famine relief” of
40,000,000 of people, as compared with about the same amount, too
frequently, indeed, but no/ yet every year, on 220,000,000 of people in
India. Has it every occurred to our critics that the proportion of people
who in ordinary years never have enough to eat is practically the same
in India as in England—viz., about 30 per cent. ? I see Mr. Hare has
evidently not quite overlooked this significant fact (p. 20).
It seems to me, however, that there is some confusion in his interesting
and instructive essay. It apparently proceeds upon the assumption that
in India only the labouring classes ( coolies A term used to describe labourers from a number of Asian countries, now considered derogatory. ) suffer from famine; but it is
very largely the petty land-holders (ryots) themselves who are affected.
Then, the suggested remedy—the storage of grain—applies only to land
holders, and was surely never a practice of the unskilled labouring classes
proper. They scarcely ever save anywhere. Moreover, if the British
Government is to bear the blame for the disastrous results of modern
civilization in the rest of India, it must be allowed some credit for the fact
that since 1770 there has been no famine to speak of in Bengal proper.
Mr. Hare’s crosses against Bengal in 1865, 1885, 1891, and 1897, must be
the result of some slip, and everyone knows that the so-called Bengal
famine in 1873 was nothing of the kind. And yet practically the same
system of administration prevails in Bengal, so far as the actual cultivator
or labourer is concerned, the only difference being that the Government
has made over about ^5,000,000 a year of its legitimate revenue
to a set of middlemen, who have become the wealthy zemindars so
well known all over the world, whilst the rights of the actual cultivating
ryot have been, until quite lately, entirely overlooked, and even now he is
nothing but a tenant with certain rights more or less secured by law. How
does Mr. Hare account for the comparative prosperity of the Bengali