1904-5.] THE CAUSES OF FAMINES IN INDIA. 233 
prosperity is it? It is the prosperity of the British; it is not the prosperity 
of the Indian people. The British have all power in their hands. They 
make the laws; they fix their own salaries; they make such offices as they 
see fit, and fill them; they grant franchises; they control the tariffs, the 
coinage and issue of money, the railways, the telegraphs, the foreign 
commerce, and a large part of the domestic commerce. Is it any wonder 
that they are prosperous? But how about those that eat the crumbs that 
fall from the masters’ tables? No people are prosperous whose average 
daily income is a cent and a half per person. No people are prosperous 
when a man like Sir William Hunter can say of them, forty millions go 
through life on insufficient food. 
We denounce ancient Rome for impoverishing Gaul and Egypt, and 
Sicily and Palestine and her other conquered provinces, by draining away 
their wealth to enrich herself. We denounce Spain for robbing the New 
World in the same way. But England is doing exactly the same thing in 
India, only she is doing it skilfully, adroitly, by ‘‘enlightened”’ modes of 
procedure, under business and judicial forms, and with so many professions 
of ‘‘governing India for her advantage, and enriching her by civilized 
methods” that the world has been largely blinded, and she herself is 
largely blinded to what is really going on. But probe down through the 
surface of fine words and legal forms to what lies below, and we have the 
same hideous business that Rome and Spain were engaged in so long, and 
for which in the end they paid so dear. Called by its right name what is 
it? It is national parasitism. It is one nation living on another. It is 
a stronger nation sucking the very life-blood of a weaker. 
BENEFITS CONFERRED ON INDIA BY GREAT BRITAIN. 
Is it said that Great Britain has done much for India, and conferred 
upon her substantial benefits? This is true: I would be the last to under- 
estimate or to have others underestimate the value of whatever good 
to India has come from British rule. But this side of the case has been so 
long and loudly proclaimed to the world, that it is time something was 
said on the other. The rule of one nation by another is a very different 
thing when looked on from the side of the rulers and from the side of the 
ruled; just as slavery in the old days was very different when seen from 
the standpoint of the master and from that of the slave. It is time the 
world knew something of the Indian situation as it appears to the people 
who pay the taxes, who have had their rights of self-rule and self-protec- 
tion taken from them, who do all the starving when the famines come, 
whose wealth has been sent away to enrich a distant land, who have felt 
the iron of five or six generations of exploitation by foreign conquerors 
