Ten years ago India exported one million hundredweight of wheat. Three years later the exports reached over six millions hundredweight, valued at three millions sterling. The Crimean war, shutting out Russian flax and hemp from Dundee, brought jute into use, and India is now richer by a steady and increasing income and nearly four millions sterling a year. There is scarcely any great article of international trade which India does not produce and deal in in increasing quantities. Cotton, jute, and wheat have been alluded to; but India exports rice, oilseeds to the extent of six millions sterling per annum, indigo, opium, tobacco, coffee, cinchona (an industry of recent years), and tea, the trade in which has multiplied fourfold in ten years and is still increasing. Its carpets and rugs are familiar to every English, household. Its pottery, as exemplified in the Bombay School of Art, requires only to be better known to become a fashionable craze, profitable for India and wholesome for English taste. In addition to these exports, India has coal, not very good it is true; iron, of the best quality in the world; copper, some lead, much tin, petroleum, and a fathomless stock of saltpetre, with which it supplies the world's need of gunpowder.

With a country thus exceptionally rich

in natural products, it will reasonably be asked why we hear so much of the poverty of the people and of the difficulty the administration find in making both ends meet. One reason for this is that for the last quarter of a century India has been plagued with famine and war. The mutiny of '57, the great famines of 1874 and 1876-78, and the last attempt to create a scientific frontier on the north, whilst they account for the unflourishing state of the Indian Exchequer, really supply the best proofs of the natural wealth of the country and the elasticity of its revenues. There are few other countries in the world that could have survived those successive blows, whereas India to-day is more prosperous, with fairer prospects, than at any previous period of her history.

Relief from war or, what is scarcely less fatal to the prosperity of a country, deliverance from the daily apprehensions born of a restless policy, has come only within the last four years, and the taxpayers of the country are still handicapped by the weight of expenditure incurred in the Afghan war. But recovery is almost complete, and it is expected that the year's Budget of 1884 will show a fair surplus. As to the recurrence of famine, the foundations of its empire are being sapped

every year. With the growth of irrigation famine is beaten within smaller and smaller area, and when after long successive drought it rears its head, the extension of railways enables the Government to grapple with it. For irrigation works and for the fostering of trade the natives of India have directly to thank the British Government. That Government is in the strictest and best sense a paternal government, watching over the needs and the welfare of the people with keen, wise eyes, and doing for them what they are either too indolent or too ignorant to do for themselves.

It is undeniable that in the earlier history of British rule in India there are many pages which cannot be looked upon without feelings of shame and indignation. For the last thirty years, since the Viceroyalty of Lord Dalhousie, the whole energies and the entire spirit of the English Government have been devoted to improving the condition of the natives and of the country. "Governments exist for the good of the governed," was Lord Dalhousie's rule, a little startling, not to say blasphemous, to Anglo-Indians of the old school, but which has on the whole been adopted as the axiom off successive viceroys. The result of British rule upon the condition of the natives is set

forth in the incontrovertible language of facts. Wherever a state has been annexed it has grown in numbers, prosperity, and social improvement.

We hear from time to time much passionate sympathy expressed for the "down-trodden native of India," crushed under the weight of taxation. As a matter of fact the rate of gross taxation paid by the natives during the ten years ending 1879 was 3s. 8d. a head. In 1880 the foray into Afghanistan had increased this to 4s. a head. But the British taxpayer, in addition to local and municipal rates, pays imperial taxes at the rate of £2 a head. In the penultimate days of the Mogul Empire, of which England was in due course the successor, eighty millions sterling were exacted in the way of taxation as against thirty-five millions now drawn, whilst Aurungzebe ruled over a smaller area and a considerably less population than own the sway of Victoria. The Famine Commissioners, in their report published in 1880, state that throughout British India the landed classes pay revenue at the maximum rate of 5s. 6d. a head, the trading classes pay 3s. 3d., the artizans 2s., and the agricultural labourers 1s. 8d.

"Any native of India," the Commissioners add, "who does not trade or own land, and

who chooses to drink no spirituous liquor and to use no English cloth or iron" (conditions easily fulfilled by a native), "need pay in taxation only about 7d. a year on account of the salt he consumes.' On a family of three persons the charge amounts to 1s. 9d.; which, it is true, is in the lowest strata equal to four days' wages of a labouring man and his wife. But what labouring man is there in England who would not gladly compound with the State by yielding four days', or even seven days', labour as payment in full for all taxation, direct, indirect, local, and municipal?

The truth is that India has been made by England, after being delivered by her strong arm from successive floods of cruel conquest and rapine, Afghan, Mussulman, Persian, Tartar, or Maharatta. The natives who tilled the soil had no chance till the English came, and it must be admitted not much immediately after, though it was the rajahs, fat with the spoils of each other's palaces and temples, that Clive and Warren Hastings chiefly bled. All that is changed now, and the good of the governed is the object of the solicitude of the governors, not without some evidences of fretful irritation on the part of the descendants and successors of the old colonists. India has now fairly entered upon the path of pros