307 



that the land might be made to yield food in abundance for 

 many more than the present number of inhabitants without 

 departing from the system of small holdings ; but to this the 

 stimulus was wanting which a large town population con- 

 nected with the rural districts by easy and inexpensive means 

 of communication would afford. That town population did not 

 grow up, because the few wants and unaspiring spirit of the 

 cultivators, joined, until lately, with great insecurity of pro- 

 perty from military and fiscal rapacity, prevented them from 

 attempting to become consumers of town produce. In these 

 circumstances, Mr. Mill considered that the best chance of an 

 early development of the productive resources of India con- 

 sisted in the rapid growth of the export of its agricultural 

 produce, cotton, indigo, sugar, coffee, &c., to the markets 

 of Europe. The producers of these articles would be con- 

 sumers of food supplied by their fellow-agriculturists in 

 this country ; and the market thus opened for surplus-food 

 would, accompanied by good government, raise up by degrees 

 extended wants and desires towards European commodities 

 or towards things which would require for their production 

 in this country a larger manufacturing population. 



Since Mr. Mill wrote, it is exactly by means of the 

 expansion of foreign trade that the country has made the pro- 

 gress it has made ; that communications have been and are 

 being developed ;* that internal trade has been fostered, and a 

 re- arrangement of industries with reference to the natural 

 advantages and productive resources of the several localities is 

 being effected ; that factory industries are being brought into 

 existence ; that the standard of living of the various classes 

 has improved ; and that these classes have been enabled to 

 benefit to some extent by the example, skill, and enterprise 

 of European nations and the cheap capital furnished by 

 them. If it be said that factory industries have as yet been 

 introduced on a limited scale, the answer is that the influences 

 of foreign trade have hardly had thirty years' time to work, 

 and that it would be distinctly mischievous to adopt any 

 measures which would retard the rate of its expansion and 

 prevent the only chance the country has of having estab- 

 lished within it industries carried on under modern condi- 

 tions and worked on an economical basis. As regards the 

 argument that the soils of the country are being impover- 

 ished, I have already pointed out that the evil has not been 

 as yet felt to an appreciable degree, that the extension of 

 foreign denjand for agricultural produce is the only means 

 available for the introduction of improved methods of cultiva."^ 



