England's Work in IndiaSmith Elder & Company, 1881 - 142 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
acre administration Afghan Agricultural Akyab ancient annual annum army Assam Aurangzeb average banditti Bengal Bombay British India British rule Calcutta capital cattle cent Central Provinces cities civilisation classes cost courts crops cultivators Delhi demand difficulties district England English exist expenditure exports fact Famine Commissioners feed finance food-supply frontier gang-robbers Government of India Hindu Húglí husbandmen Imperial increase Indian navy Indian races industrial inhabitants invasions jungle labour land revenue landlord last century legislative less Madras manure means ment millions sterling worth Mughal emperors Mughal Empire Muhammadan municipal Musalmán native dynasties native rule nearly nett official one-third Orissa Oudh peasant peasantry perished plough police population poverty present problem proprietors provinces railways raised rent rule in India rural Sanskrit scale soil Southern India square mile strangler subsistence tenants tion tracts trade vast village whole wild beasts yield
Popular passages
Page 22 - ... they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found ; they ate the leaves of trees and the grass of the field ; and in June 1770, the Resident at the Durbar affirmed that the living were feeding on the dead. Day and night a torrent of famished and disease-stricken wretches poured into the great cities.
Page 135 - I do not believe that a people numbering one-sixth of the whole inhabitants of the globe, and whose aspirations have been nourished from their earliest youth on the strong food of English liberty, can be permanently denied a voice in the government of their country. I do not believe that races, among whom we raise a taxation of 35 millions sterling, and into whom we have instilled the maxim of " No taxation without representation...
Page 18 - Bengal are not like the robbers in England — individuals driven to such desperate courses by sudden want; they are robbers by profession, and even by birth ; they are formed into regular communities, and their families subsist by the spoils which they bring home to them...
Page 26 - As the rural communities relinquished their hamlets and drew closer together towards the centre of a district, the wild beasts pressed hungrily on their rear. In vain the East India Company offered a reward for each tiger's head sufficient to maintain a peasant's family in comfort for three months — an item of...
Page 61 - After a minute comparison of rural India at present with the facts disclosed in the manuscript records, I am compelled to the conclusion that throughout large tracts the struggle for life is harder than it was when the country passed into our hands.
Page 48 - the missionary seems to be a charitable Englishman who keeps an excellent cheap school, speaks the language well, preaches a European form of their old incarnations, and drives out his wife and little ones in a pony-carriage.
Page 39 - During the half century which has elapsed since that date, they have quickly multiplied by sixfold. In 1880 India sold to foreign nations 66 millions sterling worth of strictly Indian produce, which the Indian husbandman had reared, and for which he was paid. In that year the total trade of India, including exports and imports, exceeded 122 millions sterling.
Page 139 - REVIEW. FROM GRAVE TO GAY : being Essays and Studies concerned with Certain Subjects of Serious Interest, with the Puritans, with Literature, and with the Humours of Life, now for the first time collected and arranged. By j.
Page 3 - ... well-drained cities ; that the mountain walls which shut off the interior of India from the seaports have been pierced by roads and scaled by railways; that the great rivers which formed the barriers between provinces, and desolated the country with their floods, have now been controlled to the uses of man, spanned by bridges, and tapped by canals. But what would strike him as more surprising than these outward changes is the security of the people. In provinces where every man, from the prince...
Page 119 - Sir William Hunter has said : — "If we are to govern the Indian people efficiently and cheaply we must govern them by means of themselves".