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the labourers receive by the operation of the poor laws, not so much according to their work as their wants; but in India nothing of the kind exists; it is an immense agricultural country, in which, from the seasons becoming more regular, from the greater care bestowed on cultivation, and from the tranquillity which it enjoys, the produce of the earth is becoming more and more abundant, while the precious metals are diminishing in even a faster ratio than the few manufactures it possessed. Mr. Rickards says, that if the trade be thrown open (I cannot understand this expression in any other manner than reducing the duty in England on East-India sugar, coffee, &c.) the exports of England to India will be increased to ten times their present amount; how this is to be the case while the landed revenue of the country is diminishing, and in some places the people objecting from sheer inability to pay it in money, is extraordinary; if the British government continue their present prohibitions on the raw and manufactured produce of Hindostan, while beggaring every artizan in the country by the introduction of cheap goods, the East-India Company may be soon without any revenue but that which they will receive in kind; for let it be remembered, the taxes in England are on consumption, those in India on land.*

Necker thus defends the system of corn laws in France: "Should a minister adopt a legislation for the commerce of corn? Love for the people will prevent his blindly abandoning that traffic to an excess of liberty; that he may prevent sudden starts in the price of subsistence; since those movements unattended to, not being followed immediately by a similar rise in the price of work, necessarily exposes those who live by their labour to real suffering."

The philosophic Mill thus explains the effect of so monstrous a system as that of annihilating the manufacturing interest of an immense country, and making it one field of food: "There can be no doubt," says Mr. Mill, "that, by increasing every year the proportion of the population which you employ in raising food, and diminishing every year the proportion employed in every thing else, you may go on increasing food as fast as population increases, till the labour of a man upon the land is just sufficient to add as much to the produce as will

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The condition of India is not, therefore, to be judged of by its revenue system, but by the value which its surplus produce, whether corn, sugar, or coffee, will bring in a foreign market; yet England, though requiring remittances from India, will neither use these articles nor allow India to trade with continental Europe or America as an independent state. I will no longer pursue a topic which ought to make every person calling himself an Englishman, blush for the conduct of parliament* towards the Hindoos, the lamentable effects of which are seen in the fourth chapter, on the import trade from India. But I cannot close the chapter, without referring to an error (rather a popular one), respecting the effects of the metayer system in Italy. Mr. Rickards, in allusion to this subject, says (Lords, 3963)," the poverty of the cultivators is extreme, the cultivation is consequently in a low state, and far less productive than it would be if greater capital could

maintain himself and raise a family. But if things were made to go on in such an order till they arrived at that pass, men would have food, but they would have nothing else. There would be nothing for elegance, nothing for ease, nothing for pleasure. There would be no class exempt from the necessity of perpetual labour, by whom knowledge might be cultivated, and discoveries useful to mankind might be made. There would be no physicians, no legislators. The human race would become a mere multitude of animals of a very low description, having only two functions, that of raising food and that of consuming it. Many a reader may be startled to learn such truths. They are exposed to every Englishman in India, and will every day receive some new and strong corroboration."-Supplement to Ency. Brit., article "Colony."

I must, of course, except the philanthropic President of the Board of Control, Sir Charles Forbes, and many others: the motion which the worthy baronet has given notice of, namely, to reduce the duty on saltpetre from 6d. to 3d. per cwt.; on rice from 1s. to 6d. ditto; on pepper from 1s. to 6d. per lb. will not be supported in the house, and Sir Charles will have the mortification to find in this, as in very many other instances, his benevolent feelings and comprehensive policy are of little avail to the Hindoos, when opposed by selfishness, or narrow and impolitic principles; even Sir Charles' representation, that EastIndia coffee pays 9d. per lb. duty, while chicory root, with which it is adulterated, is only to pay 6d. per lb. by Mr. P. Thompson's customs bill, has been useless: this is a bad specimen of commercial legislation.

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be employed to improve it; but, in the present state of the cultivators, it appears to me quite impossible. The system in India is, in fact, very like what has been described in Europe under the denomination of the metayer system; it is a division of produce between cultivators and proprietors, the only difference being that in India the proprietors are the government, whilst in Europe there are individual proprietors deriving a net rent; but the cultivators under the metayer system being, like the ryots or cultivators in India, in a state of the most destitute and wretched poverty; * the condition of the latter may be judged of by comparing it with that of the former." The metayer system of Europe principally exists in Italy, it will be well therefore to investigate the state of farming there, and the condition of the cultivator, as Mr. Rickards has informed Parliament it may from thence judge of the "most wretched and destitute poverty" of the Hindoos. I begin with Tuscany, a dukedom of 6,320 square miles area, with a population so great as 205 to the square mile, and yielding an annual revenue to the state of 9s. 84d· from each individual.

* Mr. Rickards delights to speak of the "most destitute and wretched poverty," (destitute poverty and wretched poverty) of the Hindoos, from what he saw of the wild inhabitants of Malabar, a quarter of a century ago. Let him walk down to Spitalfields, or drive to Manchester, and he will witness poverty, compared with which, India is a paradise; but if this be not sufficient, let him cross the Channel to Ireland, and he will find enough of "the most wretched and destitute poverty." Unfortunately for Mr. Rickards, the Irish are not under the government of the East-India Company; if they were, we should have heard, before this, of thousands subsisting upon sea-weed, or, like the savages of New Holland, prowling along the ocean shores in search of putrid fish! It is a wonder Mr. Rickards does not ascribe the state of the Irish to the "monopoly of the EastIndia Company.'

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If Mr. Rickards were to visit Ceylon, particularly the Kandyan provinces, as the author of this work has done, he would witness a state of destitution which would shut his lips against the Company's Government. This magnificent island, as large as Ireland, does not

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The first author at hand, is an interesting tour through Italy, by Mr. James Cobbett (in 1829), who Mr. Rickards will admit to be a good judge of farming, and disposed to look narrowly into the condition of the people.

The system of farming in Tuscany, according to Mr. James Cobbett, is this: "The landlord finds all the capital, and he pays for half of what it may be necessary to risk, such as food for the farmer's cattle and manure for his land. For rent and for the interest of his capital, the landlord receives one-half of the profits of the farm. The farmer cultivates the land, and attends to the stock at his own expense.” (P. 76.)

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This is the general system in Italy, and its effects are thus narrated by James Cobbett, who describes farming on the Riviera as 66 a sort of farming in romance." says, great labour, and that too during ages of time, must have been endured to give hundreds of acres of the land its present shape," (p. 36). This is in allusion to the very sides of the mountains being cultivated, and the earth drilled in terraces supported by walls to prevent the soil being washed away by the rains from the mountain top. Speaking of Lucca he writes," it is quite a treat to see its agriculture; it is not farming, it is literally market gardening all the way: not so much the appearance of a tract of country divided into farms, and farms subdivided into fields, as of one immense field divided into gardens, and gardens laid out into beds." Again he says, "we have nothing properly called farming, that is at all compared with the field culture contain a million of inhabitants, nor grow rice sufficient for their support; and yet the authorities draw but one-tenth of the landed rental; his Majesty's government, however, made up for their abstemiousness with respect to the land, by taxing a great variety of other things; even the fish for market, which is caught in the rivers or in the sea, did not escape fiscal exaction. Add to which, the system of forced labour which I have witnessed in the province of Ouva, is a disgrace to the British name. Sir Wilmot Horton has indeed a fine field for the exercise of his liberal principles.

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displayed here, there is scarcely an instance of failure, or any thing like patchiness in a crop, and every crop that is above ground shews that it has wanted nothing that the art of raising it and the industry of the artist could bestow. The side of every hill is cultivated in this way, every particular shews the most minute attention; many of the fields do not measure more than four or five square rods, and you will sometimes see thirty or forty of them all adjoining to one another, each being separately fenced in with vines trained to stakes or reeds; it would be hard to say whether it be the offerings of Bacchus or Ceres, that are here the most studiously solicited; some of the most luxurious crops of corn in the world are those which are grown here; the soil, however, must be an ungrateful one if it yield not the best of wine and corn, and if the enjoyment of nature's two choicest gifts in equal abundance be any where the right of human industry, the laborious and ingenious cultivators of the pretty little fields of Lucca may surely look upon it as due to them," (p. 107).

Speaking of the country about Naples, the same agreeable author says: "This, I take it, is about the perfection of Italian agriculture, though you do not see such great care and neatness as about Lucca and some other places.”

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This is certainly any thing but a picture of the most destitute poverty,' which Mr. Rickards asserts, with his usual recklessness, is the inevitable consequence of the metayer system; but let us follow Mr. Cobbett. In his tour of Pisa he says: "the sight of the farmers and the labouring men from the country, with their wives and daughters, is pleasing, they look so contented and happy: the country people are all very nicely dressed, all clean and neat," (p. 85). "The people are infinitely better off than we are," p. (149). Nicely dressed, and all clean, neat

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