222 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [Vorn Viuie 
all, do not prevent men, women and children dying in the streets in droves, 
and the roads being strewed with carcasses....I have met with very few 
public men who will not, in confidence, own their belief that the people 
are over-taxed, and that the country is in a gradual state of impoverish- 
mene. /* 
Mr. Frederick John Shore, of the Bengal Civil Service, wrote in 1837: 
‘‘The halcyon days of India are over; she has been drained of a large 
proportion of the wealth she once possessed, and her energies have been 
cramped by a sordid system of mis-rule, in which the interests of millions 
have been sacrificed to the benefits of the few.” 
Mr. Montgomery Martin, a historian of the British Colonies and De- 
pendencies, wrote in 1838: ‘‘So constant and accumulating a drain, even 
on England, would soon impoverish her; how severe, then, must be the 
effect on India, where the wages of a labourer is from two pence to three 
pence a day.’’f 
Prof. H. H. Wilson, historian of India, says of the annual drain of 
wealth: ‘‘Its transference to England is an abstraction of Indian capital 
for which no equivalent is given; it is an exhausting drain upon the country, 
the issue of which is replaced by no reflux; it is an extraction of the life- 
blood from the veins of national industry which no subsequent introduc- 
tion of nourishment is furnished to restore.’ 
Mr. A. J. Wilson, in an article in the Fortnightly Review, of March, 
1884, wrote: ‘‘In one form or another we draw fully 430,000,000 
a year from that unhappy country (India), and there the average wages 
of the natives is about 45 per annum, less rather than more in 
many parts. Our Indian tribute, therefore, represents the entire earn- 
ings of upwards of six millions heads of families—say of 30,000,000 
of the people. It means the abstraction of more than one tenth of the 
entire sustenance of India every year.”’ 
Mr. Herbert Spencer gave much attention to Indian affairs, and again 
and again bore strong testimony against what he characterized as the ‘‘cun- 
ning despotism which uses native soldiers to maintain and extend native 
subjection,” the ‘‘grievous salt-tax,”’ ‘‘the pitiless taxation which wrings 
from the poor ryots nearly half the products of the soil,’’ and that arro- 
gant assumption which ‘‘tacitly assumes that Indians exist for the benefit 
of Anglo-Indians.”’ 
In January, 1902, Mr. Josiah Oldfield, D.C.L., said in a letter in the 
* Bishop Heber’s ‘‘Memoirs and Correspondence,’ by his widow. Vol. II., p. 413. 
+ History, etc., of Eastern India, Vol. II, p. 12. 
t ‘‘ History of British India,’’ Ed. 1858, Vol. VI., p. 671. 
