We cannot believe this of a noble body of Indian gentlemen.
Should not the local revenue be augmented to pay for this?
Also, if money is borrowed, it must be repaid with interest, although it is applied to the improvement of private estates.
Clearly, in some way or other, justice requires that men who own these lands, on which so many thousands die from preventable fevers—and now and then from a famine, which counts its deaths by hundreds of thousands—should either pay, or the Government should remove the people (one of our alternatives), in which case the value of land will cease to exist.
7. Should not the landowner be made liable by lawPractical solutions. to pay for all that is really done to improve the land or to save the lives of the people on it? Is not the real practical solution of the financial problem a scheme like that applied to Lancashire after the cotton famine—a fund administered by trustees who lend from it, on security of local revenues, for works of permanent value to the reproductive powers of the locality, the advances to be repaid by instalments from local revenue at such rates as shall extinguish the debt in a reasonable term of years?
Or should not the Government do as they did in Ireland—advance money to the landlords, and send to the Encumbered Estates Courts all who could not repay them?
