1904-5.] THE CAUSES OF FAMINES IN INDIA. 223 
London Daily News: ‘‘I have just returned from a study of the Indian 
problems on the spot....I have seen brave, honest, hard-working, eco- 
nomical people, toiling on week after week, with only a piece of bajri or 
towar bread and a handful of pickles to keep it down, and a drink of butter- 
milk twice a day....There is no famine in India at the present time; 
but I have visited scores of villages and have entered many a house, and 
have found the corn bin already empty or nearly empty... . Their scanty 
harvest has already been sold to pay the tax, and in another two months 
they will have nothing at all left. . . . Their wives’ ornaments were 
sold last year, and even their copper cooking pots had to go to the market, 
and now they have nothing to sell. . . . Are we going to allow the 
present form of government to go on, which allows remediable evils to 
remain unremedied, which is taking taxes from people who are in a state 
of semi-starvation, and which is spending money so obtained on absentee 
landlordism ?’’* 
Two or three years ago Mr. S. S. Thorburn, Ex-Financial Commis- 
sioner of the Punjab, a distinguished Indian administrator, declared that 
the present British system of government in India has resulted in re- 
ducing 70,000,000 of human beings, for whom Great Britain is responsible, 
to such a condition of hopeless penury that no reform can now do them 
any good. 
Says Mr. R. C. Dutt, author of ‘‘The Economic History of India’’: 
“In India an amount equal to about one-half the net resources of the 
country is annually taken away from the country, and thus renders the 
people helplessly poor. It is a drain unexampled in any country on earth 
at the present day; and if England herself had to send out one-half of 
her annual resources to be spent in Germany or France, or Russia, there 
would be famines in England.”’ 
These utterances of English students of India, and of distinguished 
officials connected with the Indian Government, help us to see both how 
great is the impoverishment of the Indian people, and some of the causes 
which have produced it. 
THE PEOPLE DEPRIVED OF THE POWER OF SELF-PROTECTION. 
The causes of India’s impoverishment are many. One, which in a 
sense is fundamental to all the rest, is the subject condition of the 
people. India has no self-government,—no voice whatever in making 
her own laws. She is ruled by aliens. This means that she has no power 
to guard her own interests, to shape her own industrial development 
* Quoted by Mr. Wm. Digby in ‘“*The Ruining of India,’”’ 1902, p. 25. 
