Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎524v] (173/238)

386 Proceedings of the East India Association.
He (Mr. Rees) could not. A comparison had also been instituted between
the proportion of income taken from the far wealthier population of the
United Kingdom and that taken from the people of India, but in the
former case most of the money came from one and the same class, and in
the latter taxation spread all over a country which lacked a rich middle
class. The Emperor Akbar, by common consent the most just of the
foreign former Rulers of India, had laid down as one of the rules of
revenue administration that there should be left to the cultivator as much
as was required for food for himself and his children, and for seed until
next harvest, and that the remainder was the Land Tax. Let that be com
pared with the 10 per cent., or even the exceptional 20 per cent., of the
present Land Tax. He thought that if the suggestion of Sir Roland
Wilson, that Government should cease to support education, were carried
out, it would be the most unpopular thing ever done in India, and he
would greatly regret to see the system of education, which had been built
up by so many earnest and eminent men in India with most excellent
results, departed from in any way, except to improve it. He considered
that the Government had got back its money’s worth in the admirable
administrators who had been trained under the existing system, but, at the
same time, he would not hesitate to say that there were a great many flaws
in our education, and he thought the greatest of all was that it turned out
men with a disposition not to care for Indian things, but to hanker after
Western ideas, which made them the less useful, in some cases useless, and
on others mischievous, when the objects to which their lives were to be
devoted were taken into consideration.
Mr. Thorburn said that the bewildering and wholly unsettling paper
they had heard read had touched on so many points of Indian administra
tion, and closed so inconclusively, that he doubted whether the doubting
propounder of those doubts had any settled convictions at all—on the
subject of the paper, at least. Sir Roland Wilson had convinced himself
that India was poor, that education was more or less of a luxury, and that
the Government of India had a great many urgent needs for money for
reforms and other necessary purposes, and therefore he held it would be
better that the Government should drop the educational paint-brush—for a
time, at least—and leave it to the Indians themselves to take it up, and
daub the healthy brown of their natural complexions a sickly English white
or any other colour.
Coming to the point of the lecturer’s points and perplexities, the various
estimates of average income, all proving poverty, he thought that hypo
thetical estimates based on conjectural data only showed that those who
made them, whether Viceroys or Digbys, had idle time on hand, and well
they all knew what Dr. Watts had said, how “ Satan finds some mischief
still for idle hands to do.” Those fallacious and misleading estimates
were, he thought, wholly mischievous, what in the Settlement Department
used to be called “ fireworks,” because they made a great show and there
was really very little in them.
Now, passing to the question of the weight of the Land Revenue Assess
ments in India, the Government, the Famine Commission, and the