840 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



working and successful man is kept low 

 by weak and very often idle relatives." 

 The system, to quote Mr. Barnett again, 

 "checks enterprise and tends to make 

 a dead level of poverty in which there 

 are no richer people to act as barriers 

 against the flood of famine or bad 

 times." One is sometimes touched, he 

 confesses, by the way in which the 

 strong hold on to the weak, but it is 

 impossible not to notice that idlers 

 abound. Nowhere is there so little in- 

 dividuality, nowhere such feebleness in 

 prospect or in presence of calamity. 



While family feeling is strong in In- 

 dia, the general feeling of humanity is 

 weak. The reason, our author says, is 

 "partly because the people think too 

 much of their gods. . . . The chief duty 

 of man seems to be to please his god ; 

 and when, by a gift, he has delivered 

 himself of this duty, he thinks no more 

 of his brother at the gate." Among 

 such people the task of a government 

 seeking to effect reforms becomes ex- 

 tremely difficult. "All measures," Mr. 

 Barnett well observes, "must be inef- 

 fectual "so long as the people themselves 

 are deficient in life-preserving qualities, 

 such as confidence, enterprise, and self- 

 control." Here we have the gist of the 

 whole matter. There are certain quali- 

 ties, moral, intellectual, physical, which 

 are life-preserving. They may be said 

 to qualify for life; and when they are 

 absent nothing but a constant strain 

 upon better qualified individuals will en- 

 able the defective ones to survive. By 

 " confidence," Mr. Barnett means in this 

 place confidence in others, and he illus- 

 trates his remark by stating that, for 

 want of confidence, any savings the poor 

 can make in India " are not invested or 

 even intrusted to a bank ; they are turned 

 into jewelry to burden the women's fin- 

 gers, toes, noses, and ears, and at last 

 sold to provide a marriage feast." He 

 cites the fact that there are in India four 

 hundred thousand jewelers and only three 

 hundred thousand smiths. As a life-pre- 

 serving quality, however, confidence in 



self is at least as important as confidence 

 in others ; and confidence in self, or, in 

 other words, self-reliance, is just the 

 quality at which so much of the charity 

 of our day strikes. Charity is flowing 

 in an ever-broadening stream ; but it 

 does not qualify for life those whom it 

 enables to live ; on the contrary, it saps 

 what little energy they have, and so 

 hands on a magnified problem to be 

 dealt with by the chanty of the future. 

 The inhabitants of India are said to 

 be the most docile people in the world, 

 but on that very account they are more 

 difficult to govern, because their weak- 

 ness makes them look to the Government 

 for everything. As Mr. Barnett forcibly 

 remarks, "It is perhaps more difficult 

 to keep a weak man on his feet than to 

 prevent a strong man from rising." If 

 you have the strong man down you have 

 gravitation in your favor ; but in trying 

 to keep the weak man up you have 

 gravitation against you, and gravitation 

 is apt to win in the long run. The Gov- 

 ernment of India, Mr. Barnett testifies, 

 is doing a great deal of useful work in 

 the promotion of industries, the improve- 

 ment of the soil by irrigation, and the 

 enforcement, as far as possible with such 

 a population, of sanitary measures. But 

 all this costs money, and as one thing 

 leads to another, one abuse corrected 

 revealing a dozen others that need cor- 

 rection, the expense of government and 

 the burdens which the people have to 

 bear in the way of taxation are con- 

 stantly increasing. " Government," as 

 Mr. Barnett puts it, " does much to re- 

 lieve the people, but the conclusion of 

 the whole matter leaves one doubtful if 

 it would not be more helpful if it did 

 less for them and took less from them." 

 And he pithily adds, " A system un- 

 doubtedly good may be so costly as to 

 be bad." Surely there is much in all 

 this that we may reflect on with advan- 

 tage here. The advantage of such a 

 comparative study as Mr. Barnett is 

 making is that it shows various evils in 

 their fuller development, and puts com- 



