a local inundation, and, notwithstanding the facilities for importation
afforded by water-carriage, one third of the people died."

Here we have a vivid representation of the economic condition of a
society which, however highly civilized in many important respects,
still retained, at the epoch treated of, its aboriginal type of
organization. Here we see each community brought face to face with the
impossible task of supplying, unaided, the deficiencies of nature. We
see one petty district a prey to the most frightful destitution, even
while profuse plenty reigns in the districts round about it. We find an
almost complete absence of the commercial machinery which, by enabling
the starving region to be fed out of the surplus of more favoured
localities, has in the most advanced countries rendered a great famine
practically impossible.

Now this state of things the government of 1770 was indeed powerless to
remedy. Legislative power and wisdom could not anticipate the invention
of railroads; nor could it introduce throughout the length and breadth
of Bengal a system of coaches, canals, and caravans; nor could it all at
once do away with the time-honoured brigandage, which increased the cost
of transport by decreasing the security of it; nor could it in a
trice remove the curse of a heterogeneous coinage. None, save those
uninstructed agitators who believe that governments can make water run
up-hill, would be disposed to find fault with the authorities in Bengal
for failing to cope with these difficulties. But what we are to
blame them for--though it was an error of the judgment and not of the
intentions--is their mischievous interference with the natural course of
trade, by which, instead of helping matters, they but added another
to the many powerful causes which were conspiring to bring about the
economic ruin of Bengal. We refer to the act which in 1770 prohibited
under penalties all speculation in rice.

This disastrous piece of legislation was due to the universal prevalence
of a prejudice from which so-called enlightened communities are not yet
wholly free. It is even now customary to heap abuse upon those persons
who in a season of scarcity, when prices are rapidly rising, buy up the
"necessaries of life," thereby still increasing for a time the cost of
living. Such persons are commonly assailed with specious generalities to
the effect that they are enemies of society. People whose only ideas
are "moral ideas"