On the Conditions of Wlieai-Gh'owincj in India. 49 
clean a grain as possible. For what purpose ? That specially 
prepared particles of mud, to the extent of the five per cent., 
may be added by the middle-man at the cost of the cultivator, 
who is paid as if it had been tliere originally. After all, the 
export trade is by no means the largest market for Indian 
wheat. The returns from every corner of the empire are full of 
notices to the effect that " no wheat is exported from this dis- 
trict, although it is largely grown." 
A careful perusal of very nearly everything that has been 
written on Indian wheat leaves the impression that but for the 
«Sect of the Indian exports on the English farmer we should 
have known as little to-day of the wheat trade as we do of the 
rice — a trade that continues to bear a heavy export duty of over 
fourteen per cent. Rice is practically the only article of Indian 
produce (opium being excepted) that bears an export duty ; and, 
in spite of all this, more rice is exported than wheat. 
We have endeavoured to convey an impartial impression of 
the position and character of the cultivation of wheat in India. 
We have shown that India possesses immense natural capabilities, 
that her commercial facilities are improving, her population on 
the increase, and her agriculture (if anything) too prosperous in 
relation to her manufactures. But we have also shown that, 
while this is so, there is little to warrant the alami that the 
selfish and primitive modes of agriculture pursued by her 
farming classes will soon lead to a disastrous reduction in the 
fertility of her soil. These primitive modes will no doubt be 
replaced, with the advance of national wealth and education, by 
more scientific systems of cultivation ; but even when this point 
has been reached, we shall still be justified in inferring from our 
premisses that the agricultural area of her territory will not have 
been exhausted, nor its fruitfulness reduced below the point of 
afibrding employment to her numerous peasantry. Without 
entering, however, too elaborately into the debatable theme of 
the deterioration of the Indian soil — a deterioration which, if 
it exists at all, has presumably taken place during the lapse of 
centuries — it may safely be asserted that no new light has as 
yet been thrown on the subject, no valid argument adduced to 
' justify the anticipation that a second hundred years will find the 
I wheatfields of India less fruitful than they were a century ago. 
The English farmer, then, would err as much by giving too 
anxious a credence to the alarmist outcries of an immediate 
reversion of India's agricultural prosperity as by indulging in 
a too sanguine anticipation of a rapid development disastrous to 
European agriculture. We have hinted that breakers are seen 
ahead even now in the preponderance of agricultural over indus- 
VOL. XXIV. — s. s. E 
I 
