Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/324

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308
COLONIZATION

and yet, if our views in the country extended beyond the returns of a single harvest, beyond the march of a single detachment, or the journey of a single day, we could not be so blind to their utility and advantage." He adds: "By our revenue management we have shaken the entire confidence of the rural population, who now no longer lay out their little capital in village improvement, lest our revenue officers, at the expiration of their leases, should take advantage of their labours, and impose an additional rent. …… With regard to Hindustan, those natives who are unfriendly to us might with justice declare our conduct to be more allied to Vandalism than to civilization. … Burke's severe rebuke still holds good,—that if the English were driven from India, they would leave behind them no memorial worthy of a great and enlightened nation; no monument of art, science, or beneficence; no vestige of their having occupied and ruled over the country, except such traces as the vulture and the tiger leave behind them."—pp. 10–18. He tells us that a municipal tax was imposed under pretence of improving and beautifying the towns, but that the improvements very soon stopped, while the tax is still industriously collected. In the appendix to his first volume, we find detailed all the miseries of the ryots as we have just reviewed them; and he tells us that of this outraged class are eleven-twelfths of the population! and quotes the following sentence from "The Friend of India." "A proposal was some time since made, or rather a wish expressed, to domesticate the art of caricaturing in India. Here is a fine subject. The artist should first draw the lean and emaciated ryot, scratching the earth at the tail of a plough