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27, 1863.] the India Company’s officers of all classes and orders that the spiritlessness of the Hindoo temper, and the fixity of Hindoo habits, rendered it impossible for trade ever to expand. The Company knew exactly what 150,000,000 of Hindoos wanted to buy, and what India had to sell; and the Company would transact all that sort of business for ever. As it was with the Hindoo a hundred generations before, so it was with the Hindoo of the present century. The mass of the people wanted nothing more than their two cotton wrappers, their mat to lie on, their pot to boil rice in, and their bowl to eat it out of. The upper classes might have more wants, but they were as fixed in their habits, and their trade might be calculated as easily from century to century as from season to season. I remember now the sensation of reading Bishop Heber’s remark on this, when his Journals came out. He took leave to doubt on this point which was considered so completely settled. In the course of his travels, he thought he perceived signs of the Hindoos being much like the rest of the world in the matter of getting hold of what pleases them. He told us that, the sense of security once established, and the stimulus of hope, desire, ambition once imparted, Hindoos would show as strong a liking for the good things of life as other people. The point has long been proved; for, when the trade with India was once thrown open, an expansion began which has gone on more and more rapidly ever since. There are still districts where the white man’s face has never been seen: and there are wide regions where the white man’s goods are not known, even by report; but, wherever a regular communication is established, the demand for European commodities is such as to have occasioned an expansion of the banking system and the use of a paper currency. We have seen that there was once no money, but a representative of it, as rude as that of Central Africa. By degrees the process of exchange has grown and refined till it is now found to be a rude and troublesome method to carry loads of gold and silver money, and bank notes are eagerly and confidently adopted.

There are many more interesting signs of the times than this: and perhaps the shortest and truest way of looking at the case of the Hindoos is by glancing at the state in which the recent Budget finds them. Former annual estimates, before the Company began to share its action in India with the rest of the world, suggested little to tell about the people. The revenue came chiefly from the land; and except as far as the seasons and the harvests varied, there was no change from one period to another. The cultivators never grew richer; for their creditor, the money-lender, took care of that; and they could not grow poorer; for they were always in debt to the usurer. They could not be taxed in anything but their salt; for there was nothing else that they could be caught buying; and, during the heaviest operation of the salt monopoly, tens of thousands every year of the vegetarian population of those unhealthy tropical regions died of sheer want of salt to their rice, grain and vegetables. Now there are taxes on foreign commodities, and even on income: and the revenue is improving so fast and so much that the salt is to be an open commodity, and the income-tax is to be soon removed. And how has this improvement come about? Why, everything seems to be improving; and the people certainly work much harder than they ever did before.

And why do they work harder? Because they see a prospect now of ridding themselves of debt first, and then of rising in the world.—How is that? First, wages are high; and a man can easily earn double what he ever before asked or thought of desiring.—What makes the pay so good? The scarcity of hands from the increase of employment. And then, again, the hope of rising is not only from the usurer being got rid of, but from the new chances of buying land; and for those who cannot buy there is a prospect of a permanent settlement of the rent, provided they can bring up the fertility of their land to a certain point. After that, they may make as much more out of the soil as they can, and it will be all their own.

Those who see the energy which these cultivators are putting into their work can assure us that it is not in the power of the native religion and its priests to keep the people down, if good government is set up against it. These people who are paying rent and taxes, and shaking off the money-lender, and buying European commodities, and striving to get American cotton seed, in order to bid for English custom, are the same Hindoos who have been trampled upon for two thousand years, by any who chose to come and tread them under foot. It is common to hear the strength of the country ascribed to the Mohammedan element: but the Faithful are now only one-eighth, if so much, of the population. They were the main strength of the Mutiny, in their expectation that the Prophet was to overthrow the Christian rule; but the Hindoos have strength enough to grow and prosper, very rapidly, without help from their old conquerors.

I have spoken mainly of the labouring class, because it constitutes, even more than in Europe, the mass of the population. But the progress is no less marked in all classes. At the Council Boards in all the three Presidencies, native councillors now sit, in consultation about the making of laws, and the choice of a policy. In the capitals, young Hindoo gentlemen are taking honours at college, and qualifying themselves for the liberal professions: and merchants who have made their fortunes are combining to sustain schools for the education of—not their sons only, but their daughters. In the country, the fertility of whole districts is reviving, as the waters are brought back to their old channels, or made to fill once more the long empty reservoirs. Wherever the modern canals are opened famine is banished; and wherever the swamp is parted into dry land and running water, pestilence disappears also. On the Indus and other great streams, grain, and the goods which buy grain, are carried by steam so fast and far that hunger is routed out from remote places where it never thought to be pursued. Railways not only bring tens of thousands of gazers, but thousands of travellers; and it is