XXXIV] LAND NATIONALIZATION 263 



of India. All the statements in this paper were founded 

 upon Government Reports or other official documents, referred 

 to in detail. I knew, therefore, that Grant Allen's views as 

 stated in this paper were correct, and therefore wrote to tell 

 him how pleased I was to find that he was not only interested 

 in physical science, as was so often the case with my scientific 

 friends. His reply is so interesting that I will here give the 

 more important parts of it : — 



" As to your remarks about the wrong actually perpetrated 

 by us in India, I know only too much about that question. 

 For three years I was employed by W. W. Hunter, Director- 

 General of Statistics for India, in collecting and working up 

 the district accounts and other materials in his possession. 

 Not to put too fine a point upon it, Dr. Hunter is the literary 

 whitewasher of the Indian Government. In working up the 

 abundant reports and other documents submitted to me, I 

 had plenty of opportunities for realizing what English rule 

 really meant. In the ruin wrought by our land settlements 

 especially, I collected a large number of facts and statistics ; 

 and I offered John Morley to work them into a paper on 

 * The Indian Cultivator and his Wrongs ; ' but Morley did 

 not care for the subject. The fact is, nobody in England 

 wishes to move in the matter. I sent Knowles a paper two 

 years ago about the same subject, dealing especially with the 

 Ganges Canal — a vast blunder, bolstered up by cunningly 

 contrived balance-sheets, in which deficits are concealed as 

 fresh investments ; but he would not take it. I only got 

 this article into the Contemporary by leaving out India, and 

 looking at the question from a purely English point of view. 

 I'm afraid the fact can't be blinked that most Englishmen 

 don't mind oppression as long as the oppressed people are 

 only blacks. A startling outrage, like the Zulu War, wakes 

 them up for a moment ; but chronic and old-standing sores, 

 like India or Barbadoes, do not affect them." 



Neither do '^chronic and old-standing sores" at home 

 affect them. The slums, slow starvation, murder and suicide 

 from want, one-third of our population living without a 

 sufficiency of the bare necessaries for a healthy life — food 



