Government were practically forced to take those measures. Let it not be supposed that I wish to detract from their merits. During the recent famines the Government, through its servants, acted heroically. Lacs and lacs of people, it is true, perished of starvation, but their number would have been immeasurably augmented if Government had not risen to the occasion and acted generously, promptly, and assiduously. In spite of all this, one cannot say that Government have done their duty sufficiently towards the meek, helpless, and woe-begone peasant. The soil is impoverished, and the peasant has no coin to buy manure for it. From year's end to year's end there is not a glimpse of hope or a ray of prosperity to cheer his heart. He lives in a dark and dingy hovel with a low thatched roof and tattie walls plastered with earth and cow-dung, redolent with the nauseating smell of extreme poverty. The floor is ever damp, and is a breeding place for fever bacilli during the monsoon. He has no furniture, no plate or crockery. There are a few earthen chatties, a couple of brass platters, a brass goblet and a grinding stone at which his wife at break of dawn grinds corn, singing in a plaintive voice some primitive song, keeping time as it were with the monotonous rumbling of the grinding stone. He has no mattress to lie on, but stretches his wearied limbs on the naked floor wrapping himself in a

sheet or a blanket. His wardrobe is simple. He has a couple of dhoties, one or two jackets and a turban. He needs no cupboard. A line or a cord hung in a corner of the hut serves his purpose just as well. He goes about with a piece of cloth round about his loins, sometimes with a jacket on and sometimes without it. His wife has a paraphernalia of two saries and two choulies (bodices), which she wears alternately after a bath at the village well. In the cold season he keeps off the cold by covering himself with a coarse blanket, which has perhaps rendered service for years. His troop of children go about as naked as when they came out of their mother's womb. He lives on the coarsest food imaginable. Boiled rice or bread and chutney with curd or some vegetable to break the monotony constitutes his staple food. Even this he does not get sufficiently, poor man. The luxury he generally regales in is the smoking of a chelum or a biddi. His lot is hard, his sufferings are great, but he bears his cross patiently, because he has full faith in Providence.

Nothing short of a considerable reduction in the landtax will improve the lot of the peasant. The land-tax should be reduced by about 40 per cent. The survey should be held at a much longer interval than at present, and the survey officer should hold the survey in a district not alone, but in co-operation with about a

dozen well-known men selected from that district. This will to a very great extent guarantee the correctness of the revised assessment, and obviate the cry one often hears of the inexperience or over-zeal of the survey. officer. Moreover, in case of a difference of opinion between the survery officer and the 'punch' Government will have before it sufficient materials from which to gather the true state of things. The statesman, who will accomplish this and bring prosperity to the door of the peasant, will earn for himself the countless blessings of the teeming millions of this country. Under the British Rule large towns and cities have fattened and prospered remarkably, but the rural districts have grown lanky and emaciated.

Apathy of Parliament.

I shall now deal with the question of injustice frequently done to India by the Ministers of the Crown either in the name of or with the active or passive consent of the British Parliament. It is said that the Parliament is in decadence. There are now no statesmen of the type of Pitt, Fox and Burke, Peel and Palmerton, Cobden and Bright, Disraeli and Gladstone, who could rise high in the ethereal atmosphere of true statesmanship, making a comprehensive survey of the political horizon and evoking admiration of the civilized world by their high ideal, loftiness of purpose, great prescience and wisdom. Unfortunately, the race of statesmen who made the name of England great and illustrious is now extinct. We have now only second-rate and third-rate politicians in the service of the Crown,* wielding the destiny of England's mighty Empire. The Opposition is composed of men equally feeble. In spite of this, the Parliament of Great Britain is still a dynamo of freedom, liberty and justice. Unfortunately, in the

*This was written one day before the news of the resignation of the Balfour Ministry arrived in India.

multitude of their engagements our British legislators do not pay attention to Indian questions. This should not be the case. Indians naturally look to them for the redress of their grievances. Let not their faith be shaken. That will be a bad augury for the British Rule in India.

Some years ago the Government of India was obliged, on account of the low ebb of the Indian finance, to reintroduce import duty on piece-goods arriving in the country. This impost affected the interests of Lancashire. Directly a hue and cry was raised in England, and in deference to it the ministers of the Crown forced the hands of the Government of India to levy a countervailing duty on the cloth manufactured in India. This was simply outrageous. Rather than lose their power, the ministers of the day yielded to the clamour of the Lancashire manufacturers and inflicted a great wrong on the textile industry of India. Suppose the exigencies of the finance of Great Britain had necessitated the levy of an import duty on wheat or any other stuff imported into England from India, and the Indians had demanded a coutervailing duty on the indigenous wheat or stuff, would not Englishmen have characterised the demand as impudent and unjust? Yet India was forced to do what Englishmen would never have done, in spite of their much talked-of imperialistic conscience.