Page:Progress and poverty - an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions, and of increase of want with increase of wealth - the remedy (IA progresspovertyi00georiala).pdf/132

106 slavery to which the ryots are reduced as "the consequences of our own laws;" producing in "the most fertile country in the world, a grinding, chronic semi-starvation in many places where what is called famine does not exist." "The famines which have been devastating India," says H. M. Hyndman, "are in the main financial famines. Men and women cannot get food, because they cannot save the money to buy it Yetit. Yet [sic] we are driven, so we say, to tax these people more." And he shows how, even from famine stricken districts, food is exported in payment of taxes, and how the whole of India is subjected to a steady and exhausting drain, which, combined with the enormous expenses of government, is making the population year by year poorer. The exports of India consist almost exclusively of agricultural products. For at least one-third of these, as Mr. Hyndman shows, no return whatever is received; they represent tribute—remittances made by Englishmen in India, or expenses of the English branch of the Indian government. And for the rest, the return is for the most part government stores, or articles of comfort and luxury used by the English masters of India. He shows that the expenses of government have been enormously increased under Imperial rule; that the relentless taxation of a population so miserably poor that the masses are not more than half fed, is robbing them of their scanty means for cultivating the soil; that the number of bullocks (the Indian draft animal) is decreasing, and the scanty implements of culture being given up to money lenders, from whom "we, a business people, are forcing the cultivators to borrow at