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manufactures in the province of Oudh, where the population is 500 to 
the square mile, has been serious in its results. causing a transfer of 
capital and labor from the dying trades to agriculture. The result is 
thus stated: 
We say nothing of the numbers who were supported by military service, probably 
200,000, including the King’s army and the retainers of the talookdars. The transfer 
of their labor from unpreductive to productive employment must benefit the country. 
But the suppression of the manufacture of arms and salt and of the timber trade prob- 
ably threw 200,000 more people upon the land. The two great weaving castes, the 
Julahs and the Korees, uumber more than half a million. We believe about half of 
them have been driven by competition with Manchester to abandon the manufacture 
of cloth and betake themselves to agriculture. The same result, but to a less extent, 
has followed in the case of many other professions. Potters, dyers, cloth-stampers, 
cotton-combers and cleaners, workers in metal and glass, and makers of fancy articles, 
too many to enumerate, have forsaken their hereditary trades, and are now found as 
cultivators of the soil. This has been the only alternative open to them. The system 
of caste prevents the Indian artisan from transferring his scanty capital, or his skilled 
labor, from one profession to another. But every Hindoo is more or less an agricul- 
turist, and when other trades fail the land suggests itself as the natural resource. 
We believe we are within the mark in stating that, of the eleven million inhabit- 
ants of Oudh, about one million have, since the annexation, been converted from 
traders and manufacturers into agriculturists, either as cultivators or farm-laborers, 
and that nine millions of acres are now cultivated instead of six. These new agricul- 
turists are unskilled in husbandry, and their labor is expended on the less fertile land 
of the province. 
It cannot be doubted that the return they obtain from the land for their labor and 
capital is far less than that which they obtained from their respective trades. No 
writer on political economy seems ever to have anticipated the possibility of such a 
result of free trade as has occurred in Oudh, the transfer of the capital and labor of a 
million of artisans from a more to a less productive industry. Such a result cannot 
but be accompanied with a decrease of the total wealth of a country. And the prob- 
lem is complicated by other considerations. It must be borne in mind that for every 
acre taken up for the plow, there is‘one acre the less for the plow-oxen. The diminu- 
tion of the area available for grazing cattle has of late years attracted the attention of 
many settlement officers. In many parts of Oudh the pasture-lands are miserably 
insufficient, and the wretched leanness of the cattle announces the fact to the most 
careless observer. Of course the result of ill-fed oxen is a diminished supply of manure 
available for the land, a result which is also effected in another way. For the clear- 
ance of the jungles to make way for the advance of the plow deprives the people of 
wood for fuel; they are therefore compelled more and more to consume the manure of 
their cattle for fuel, instead of devoting it to its legitimate purpose of fructifying the 
exhausted soil. ; 
SOIL-EXHAUSTION THROUGH EXPORTATION.—Mr. Robinson, of Mad- 
ras, recently delivered an address at the British Museum on modern 
agriculture, in which he made the following statements: ; 
There is a time when every exporting country discovers that exhaustion follows an in- 
judicious exporting trade. The great grain-exporting countries of Europe have already 
learned this; tracts of country which at the beginning of the export trade yielded 
large crops of wheat, produce now only one-half, in some instances even less. Thus, 
in the richest soils in the south of Russia, on which the yield was formerly 40 bushels, 
the yield is now only 18 bushels. In Poland the result is even worse, and in Dantzic 
the yield has sunk to 14 bushels. The suicidal agriculture followed in the United 
States of America has produced the same results. Only eighty years ago the average 
yield of wheat per acre in the State of New York was 24 bushels; now it is only 15 
bushels. In Virginia, which only one hundred years ago contained some of the richest 
tracts of land in the world and produced large crops, the yield is now, on some of the 
best of the old arable lands of the State, under 8 bushels per acre. The culture of 
cotton, tobacco, and maize for export, year after year, on the same land, without a par- 
ticle of manure, accounts for this; and the same explanation accounts for the thousands 
of acres of abandoned land on the eastern side of America, which the advancing set- 
tler exhausted and abandoned in his westward march; land with which the American 
Government is perplexed how to deal, the cost of restoring the exhausted elements of 
fertility being so much greater than the possible value of the land when restored. 
But so it isin every country and in every district from which the produce has been 
exported, and in which no attempt has been made to restore the gradually exhausting 
fertility. A time will come when remunerative cultivation will be impossible, and the 
land must either be abandoned or put through an expensive course of restorative 
treatment. 
