THE NEW INDIAN CALAMITY.
ET no man, however ambitious, envy the Marquis of
Salisbury his official position. The approaching famine in Southern India, a misfortune to all men and to the sufferers a terrible calamity, is to him at once a misfortune, a calamity, and a cruel vexation. It involves, in addition to endless direct and horrible consequences to the people affected, the temporary paralysis of progress throughout India. There is still a chance, a bare chance, that a catastrophe may be averted,—the rains suddenly recommencing; but this is August 5, no such occur- rence is within ordinary experience, and we must, we fear, make up our minds to a second year of comparatively total drought. This is evidently the opinion of the Indian Secretary himself, who on Saturday, in a speech at Cooper's Hill, prepared the young engineers and the world for that most heartbreaking of calamities, a famine in which hundreds of thousands die of actual starvation. That, and nothing less, will be the result of a second year of famine, should it once fairly close in upon the people of Southern India. In the threatened districts of that vast tract, equal seven Englands, there live certainly fourteen and more probably twenty millions of people, nine-tenths of whom are entirely dependent upon the crops for subsistence, while one-third at least live from hand to mouth, never a month before the world, and usually in a condition which in this country would be described as one of extreme and dangerous destitution. Even among them there is a "residuum," still more deplorably situated. There are at least one million of persons in the Madras Presidency whose whole property, including their clothes' would not in a good year sell for 10s., who are abso- lutely dependent for subsistence upon minute payments in kind or an almost imperceptible share in a small crop, and who in a year of drought, when the crop is dead and the grain wages unprocurable, have literally nothing but their waist- cloths, could not—we use the words in their most literal and dreadful meaning—keep themselves alive for forty-eight hours without assistance from the State. Owing partly to historic circumstances, partly to race peculiarities, but prin- cipally to the long prevalence of the worst land tenure ever devised by the wit of man—a tenure that seems to. economists to have been invented by some Socialist in a lit of delirium—they have lived for generations in such poverty, under so near an approach to actual hunger, that they have no stamina, and perish under any new burden like insects in rain or fish in an accidentally poisoned river. They "tend to death," the pitying but worn- out surgeons say. These are the people already applying for relief, and if the Illustrated London News could but publish photographs of any ten of the thousands of groups collected at the relief centres, or the worst place of all, the neighbourhood of Madras City, all England would flush 'with anger rather than wince with pain, from inability to con- oeive that the Government could be guiltless and Providence alone responsible for such despairing misery. Upon this population, these sixteen millions, already so tried that they sell their poor jewels, their sole surplus, at the rate of £80,000 a month, by the Mint accounts alone, upon the three millions more who have passed this stage, have sold all, and are giving up the struggle —upon this one million, who have given it up already, and are waiting death by disease in the vast encampments fed by the State, there is about to descend the 'unspeak- able horror of a second year of want,—six more months at least during which nothing will be attainable, not even grass, except from the State alms. There is no wealth in the Madras Presidency, as Englishman understand wealth, and there never has been any. Portugal, the Canton of Dam-amides], the Circle of Archangel, the Scottish Orkneys are well off
beside Denary. The State alone is rich, and the State must do all, under conditions which may well make a Secretary of State feel as if he could no longer understand what hope was. The new famine district is not a province, it is a continent. The villages are scattered, the population thin, the people, as Professor Monier Williams recently painted them, though industrious, =energetic. There is not one great end navigseas riser. There is throughout but one railway,
and in districts like kingdoms no railway at all. There are few roads worthy of the name. As Lord Salisbury expressly mentions, food, if sent to the villages, must be sent in carts drawn by oxen, which eat nearly all they carry, and cannot under any urgency do steadily twenty miles a day, and even that exhausting and wasteful device is probably beyond the power of the Government to adopt. In the famine-stricken districts there are no cattle left. Their fodder perished first, and the few beasts still left alive are, as Mr. Williams described them months ago, far too weak for draught. The Government, no doubt, could send down thousands of the beautiful cattle of the North, beasts that would excite the pride of a Lombard landlord ; but they cannot live on air, they can barely carry their own food—recollect their pace and that they have to return,—and they cannot, even to save human life, be used as food. Even the dying would rise in insurrection at the thought of such unholy diet. There is nothing for it but "relief centres," and relief centres under such circum- stances imply bursts of depopulating disease. Let any soldier acquainted with camps think of encampments with fifty thousand souls in each—men, women, and children—all arriving half-fed, and living on half-rations, stationed by streams and tanks for the sake of water, scarcely housed, and living amid tropical odours and miasmas, and he at least will recognise all the elements of the new disease which first struck Lord Hastings' camps in the Pindarree war, and has ever since terrified the world as Asiatic cholera. The prospect is ap- palling, but if the second year of famine falls—and Lord Salis- bury believes it to be falling—there is no remedy that man can apply. We are carefully. avoiding exaggeration, when we say it is not only possible, it is imminently probable, that the population of Southern India will this year be reduced by four millions, who have perished of hunger, and the diseases which hunger long-continued leaves behind it in its train.
The prospect is appalling, and the responsibility of the Sec- retary of State almost too great to bear. If he fought the famine as he fought it in Behar, fought it as he would a cam- paign, with no thought except for victory, scattering money as if it were seed, he might succeed in averting not all, but a great part of the calamity ; but he would spend, on a moderate esti- mate, twenty millions sterling, that is, he would for five years at least paralyse the progress of the Indian Government. It would be absolutely necessary that during that period nothing but the barest work of administration should be attempted, that public works should be restricted to works of maintenance, that education should be forbidden to expand, that no new department should be created, that no new tax should be levied, that any and every existing abuse which it would be costly to remove should be temporarily tolerated. Every Service must be pared down to subsistence-limit, every pro- posal involving expense must be rejected, and the Empire must be governed like an estate belonging to an owner absent on the Continent to retrench. All that is inevitable, and all that involves hardship—not to the Madrassees, who may fairly bear it as the will of Heaven, and who, to do them scant juts- tice, do boar it with an acquiescent resignation that touches those who can see it to the quick—but to the people's of regions as prosperous as they are miserable, peoples who deem themselves entirely irresponsible, and who, but. for the British rule, would only show their sympathy as one nation of Europe sometimes shows it for another. Bensal, ruling itself, would possibly subscribe £100,000 for the people of Madras. Under British rule, it will have to subscribe without its own consent the interest of the loans to be raised, which may amount, if the work is effectually done, to twenty millions sterling. Why should Bengal thus be deprived of the advan- tages nature and the unrelaxing industry of its sixty millions . of people have secured to ? We do not wonder that under such circumstances many Anglo-Indians maintain that the needful expenditure ought not to be incurred, that the calamity should be endured, like an earthquake, or a sea-wave, or an outburst of cholera, as a visitation from on high, under which man can only mourn, and that the British Government of India ought to affirm once for all that it is no more responsible for the crops or for their failure than it would be held to be if the consequences of that failure stopped short bE actual death. We should not prevent pecuniary ruin, they argoe, or the spread of disease, and why interfere because the calamity to-day sends thousands, millions, to a premature instead of to a later grave ? The attempt is too great for man, anti in making it the Government mortgages the future of unborn millions in a vain effort to secure that which God or Nature has decreed cannot be secured. It is needful', they say, to be as hard as Providence is, and stand aside in silent pity until the calamity be overpast. We are not blind to the force of these 'arguments, and on one point we recognise their truth. The Government would have no right to destroy the Indian Empire even to secure the physical safety of a• portion of its inhabitants. Its responsi- bility to the whole of its subjects is greater than its responsi- bility for any section of them. It must not terminate for ever its power of mitigating famines by a ruinous effort to extin- guish one. But the step between reasonable effort and self- destructive effort is a long one, and till ruin is in sight, at least in the far distance, the effort should be continued, regardless of all minor consequences. The Government of India must, we hold, strain every nerve to keep its people alive,—naust, that is, during the time of drought, feed them with sufficient food to keep them in reasonable health. If food actually cannot be sent to the villages, or sent only at an expense which would destroy all prospects of future grants in relief, then, of course, even human life must give way before necessity, and the people must perish as if a new disease had broken out. That this will be the actual result in thousands of villages we see, unhappily, n6 reason to doubt, unless the unexpected rain should fall. But straight up to the uttermost limit of its power, exerted as it would be exerted to feed armies, the Government is bound to strain itself to keep its people alive. Whatever it costs, the State must do its best, must multiply relief centres, must double or treble relief officers, must employ native assistance, and must push on the accumulation of food, by facilitating private enterprise, if possible, and if that is not possible, by making purchases on its own account. It is weary work, hateful work, to men who know how progress in India depends on the con- dition of the finances, but it is work which a Christian Government, that pleads its higher morale as the justification for an otherwise inexcusable conquest, cannot rightfully refuse to undertake. The State must, in fact, do in this crisis what private men are compelled to do every day,—go straight forward, do the duty of the day as it arises, and leave the ultimate consequences in the hands of the God it has obeyed. There is no path decent men can traverse to evade the duty of supporting Southern India.
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