The Sun.
London, England, 1839-07-08 00:00:00

hearing a story in Ireland of two men who were
quarrelling, and a third interfered—a person who
was present asked him why he interfered, " Oh," said
he, "as a mutual friend ;" "then," replied the other,
" I will interfere as a mutual friend on the other side"
—(A. laugh)--so the arbitrator is called in as a mutual
friend to value the crops, and so great is the stimulus to
him to do his duty honestly to the Government, that if
he did not charge as much as they like, he is in danger
of losing a very lucrative office.—( Cheers and laughter.)
I will now read to you some of the instructions to those
assessors. They are directed not to class fallow or
waste land at too low a rate. I once heard a man say
that he had looked into an empty chest, and was sur-
prised to find nothing in it ; what be could expect to
find in an empty chest I cannot imagine.—(A laugh)—
but these instructions remind me of him. These waste or
fellow lands produce nothing, and yet the assessor is not
to value them at too low a rate—that is in fact saying
to him, these lands produce nothing for themselves,
make them produce something for the Treasury.—
(Cheers.) And why are they not to be valued at too
low a rate? Why, "lest it should induce the re-
fractory ryots to give up the highly taxed culti-
vated lands and take up the waste." Here is
a method of promoting the prosperity of agriculture,
by a special caution that waste lands shall not be culti-
vated. "If the crop should produce less than the seed
Sown," one would suppose that in such a case the
ryot would be permitted to go free ; but nc—" The
Cull amount of the rent should be demanded."—(Loud
cries of ‘eShame, shame.") I am quoting from Sir
Thomas Munroe's instructions ; this is no fabrication—
no calumny._it is the direction given by the Govern-
ment to its servants. Yes, such is the damning fact,
,that even although the crop should not produce the
seed sown, the rent is still to be demanded. Why he
was surely a calumniator who said that Englishmen,
when they went to India, left their conscieners behind
them. Alen of this stamp never had any conscience to
leave behind, or same faint recollections of it—such as
poets imagine infants to have of some former state of
existence-would prevent their making • such a demand
as this. The man is to live by the loss, and pay his
rent into the bargain. " If the ryot is unable to pay, the
rent is to be assessed upon the village, and if the vil-
lage is unable to pay, it is to be assessed upon
the neighbouring villages, taking care to limit the as-
sessment within 10 or 12 per cent. lest it should injure
the next year's revenue." They will not crush these
unhappy people entirely—lest they should injure the
next year's revenue. Do the people of England know
this ? They do not ; if they did a thrill of honour
would run through the land, and the people in a voice
of thunder, which it would be impossible to resist, and
what would be heard on the banks of every Indian
river, would demand that sucVa state of things should be
suffered no longer to exist. Why are we here to-day ?
—to prove these things to the peop'c of England ; and
now they will be wafted on the wings of the press from
the Land's-end to the Hebrides, and India will hear
th, t "'Ace proclaiming happiness to her and to hers.—
(C! ears.) Take the land tax in England—if that bore
the same proportion to the general taxation which it
does in India, if that was as fourteen millions to six,
beggary and ruin must be the necessary consequence.
Why does it bear an inverse ratio in England ?
Because the Government of England knows that
the legitimate and most productive source of
revenue does not consist in grinding the people
to the earth but in taxing the commodities in the
hands of the consumer, and the revenue will increase
in proportion to the prosperity of the country. I place
that as the cardinal point of the history of the present
state of our connection with India. I wish not to
weaken its effects entering into details. Is the popular
don of a country thus situated prosperous or happy ?
Alas ! how can it be so? Its capital is wasted—its
reservoirs destroyed—its property—its prosperity—its
happiness—all, all extinct—all at an end.—(Cheers.)
The necessary result of such government follows as a
matter of course. India is visited by periodical famines.
It is a country in which the inhabitants support them-
selves upon the lowest possible scale—the trifling value
of a few rupees sufficed to feed from year's end to year's
end. They were the smallest consumers of any country,
yet the poverty is such in the whole of Lelia, that the
poor natives have not any :thing to lay bye from one
good year, to supply the nece3sary food in a bad one—
they had nothing which would allow them to save them-
selves when the crops failed. He had no store by him.
arid accordingly when such a calamity fell upon
he had nothing to do but to die, He (Mr O'C.) had
put down the dates when these famines bad occurred,
since we had changed our character—from merchants
to mighty conquerors—from traders to princes. They
come frightfully often. The year of the change, when
we first called ourselves masters in India, was 1760 ;
the first famine soon followed, for it occurred in 1766 ;
another dreadful one broke out only four years after, in
1770, when one-half of the inhabitants of Bengal
perished ; the next was in 1782 ; as if it came in every
ten years, the next was in 1792, and was followed by one
in 1803 ; then in 1804. The next, 1819, 1820, 1824,
1829, 1832, 1833 ; and, to show that the same system
prevails still, and if possible in a worse degree, the
famines come more thick, for they were in 1836, 1837,
and a most dreadful one in 1838, which was almost
universal throughout, India. That was the result of our
Government in India ; and could any man tell him that
a Christian man could meet his God, he having any,
even the slightest means in his power to put an end to
such horrors and not having used theta.—(Cheers.)
Perhaps they might think these were calamities to
which the Government were not instrumental. It was
not so ; for in 1833, when a dreadful famine raged
throughout India, there was exported from Calcutta
alone no less than 151,223,696 lbs. of rice, and
13,722,408 lbs. of rice in the husk, peas, flour, bran,
&c., all food upon which the natives of India would
willingly exist. The deaths in Agra in 1838—in our
own times, only last year—were really horrible, as ap-
peared from statements which were -authenticated. lie
would read one :—" On the 14th of April, 1838,
71,000 pining wretches, men, women, and children, were
fed by bounty at Agra ; and between the Ist and 15th
of March, 71,523 infirm and sightless creatures were
relieved in a similar manner. So great were the ravages
of death, that the air for miles was tainted with the
effluvia from the petrifying carcases of men and cattle,
and the rivers of the Jumna and the Ganges were
choked up and poisoned by the dead bodies thrown into
their channels. The water and fish of these rivers were
rejected as unfit for use, and men kept constantly employed
in pushing the accumulated bodies down the torrents. The
mortality was at the rate of 10,000 a month ; a destruc-
tion of life which, if it bad continued, would have
swept off the entire population in less than a year."
Was not that a horrible picture ? If there was a love
stronger than another in this world it was the love of a
mother to her Offspring—to what a miserable state must
a mother be reduced before she in the night took her
dear child and deprived it of life, so that she might not
have the torture of seeing it die of starvation in the
morning.e—(Sensation.) These were not long gone-by
scenes—they were being acted now, and the people of
England were tame only because they were ignorant of
them.—(Cheers.) One more extract, and he would
sicken them no more—it was unfortunately necessary,
so that the people should know what was actually tak-
ing place under an English Goverment--" 200,000 are
scantily fed daily by Government and private individuals
in the north-west provinces ; yet this is but a faint pal-
liative. The people are dying like , dogs ; mothers
throwing their living children at night into the Jumna—
disease destroying numbers whom famine has spared—
dogs and jackalls actually devouring bodies in which
life was not extinct. At Gwalior hydrophobia was as
fatal as cholera—famine dreadful—horses, asses, buf-
faloes, every-thing that had died a natural death, eaten
by the natives. At Agra the police pick up 150 bodies
daily"—and to succeed the famine the people of India
bad now the pestilence of cholera and hydrophobia.
The great and the wealthy natives might protect them-
selves, or fly from the plague, but what could the poor
and half-starving people do—they were now screaming out
to the people of England, if not for vengeance upon
those who fostered, at least that an end might be put to
a system which turned fields of abundance into fields of
pestilence and starvation.—(Cheers.) He bad many
other extracts, but he would not harrow the feelings of
the meeting by reading them ; he would content him-
self with saying, that they proved the same system to
exist in all parts of India ; the famine extended from
north to south. Let the people of England demand in
the first place, for without it there could be no peace or
happiness in India—it was the first requisite—let them
demand that the Parliament should make the law, and
that the India Company should be obliged to put it in
force—let them establish a fixity of land property.—
(Cheers.) Then they had their opium monopoly,
which they exercised most arbitrarily, ordering it to be
grown here and not there. He did not complain of
that, he complained of its production at all.—(Loud
abominable
cheers.) They were dealers in a
most
tst enemy of
poison ; they were disseminating
s.eitt pleasureswa s
si,orsewhi thaneh
the worst,
and destroyed
man—a drug which enervated the
consumption of
the soul—took away all the joys
God allowed for man in this world
d i vas mother's
even that curse of this country,
di-IL
ardent spirits. Though it debased degraded ed those
mitigation,
—(Cheers an laughter.) The
who partook of it, it was a
milk compared to opium.
erum-ea • ter has nothing to me for ; he can never give
it up as your drinkers of ardent spirits may do ; there is
nothing for him, but that his friends may wish his
seedy death.
But opium was made a source of profit
by Christian men—of men who observed the first day
of the week as the Christian sabbath--of men who go
out to the Gentoo, and tell him to leave his superstition,
and join him in worshipping a just God ; yet at the
same time, they are the groaers and profit-mongers of
that abominable drug,—(Cheers.) Then, again, the
kind of opium consumed by the Indians necessarily
diseased the stomach; and they required salt as a cor-
rective ; yet the same persons stepped in and denied
them that which God had spread throughout the land ;
so they were poisoning and profitting by the abominable
°Punt and poisoning the inhabitants of India by
denying them that necessary article which God had
blessed them without salt. Yet this was not
(hum by the wild Indian', or the Hottentot ; it was

titled to the sympathy, the watchful care and interpo-
sition of the British people.—(Hear, and cheers.)
During the last 60 years of our existence as a nation,
we have received from that country in wealth, in hard
cash, no smaller a sum than 1,000,000,0001.
Our relations and friends—the greatest,
gone to India and the wisest,
and the bravest of the empire, have rd
sterling.
filling services connected either with the military or
civil establishments there, have won wealth, and station,
anti unfadintr, laurels ; and have attained honour and
rank at home by the services rendered to the Crowa in
India. But
,ich w
notwithstanding these claims, arising out
of the wealth which we have drawn from India,
arising out of the immense value of India as
an inheritance to be transmitted to our posterity, not-
withstanding the arising out of the political
affinity existing between
arising out of the moral, the people and ourselves,
,enh intellectual, and physical wants
of a population unequalled by any otherth portion of the
British possessions, great though are, down to
this hour there bas been no Society forey gathering up,
collecting, and diffusing information touching. British
India.—(Cheers.) How has that empire been ma-
naged ? Ido not wish to speak hardly of any society
of men, nor do I wish to bring a charge against gainst any
body of men, but when I look at the way in which In-
dia has been governed, when I know that the Indian
question has been invariably considered a bore, in the
technical meaning of the term in the Houses of Lords
and Commons—( Hear, hear)—when I knew that
clauses vital to the interests of millions have been passed
in Houses that might have been counted.out, that
would have been counted out if anyother question than,e
this, connected with the power, wealth, and patronage
of individuals in this country was involved—when /
know that questions, vital to the happiness of
millions, have been decided in Houses such
these, and that, from one Charter to another, a
to
s
twenty-four gentlemen has been entrusted the des-
tinies of one hundred millions of human beings, I
blush for the criminality of a Country which overlooks
the
claims of so vast an empire, and commits them to
the wisdom of men, who, if they were the w. isest and
kindest of mankind, are unable to feelthe
"l
or care for them
P
aright.—(Cheers.) 1 impugn, not
prescnt or past Court of Directors—l grant that they
y