they were not sufficient in area, duration or intensity to affect
the material conditions of the people. The ten succeeding years,
however, ending with 1904 witnessed a succession of calamities
that were unprecedented either in India or anywhere else on earth,
with the exception of a famine that occurred in the latter part
of the eighteenth century. Those ten years not only saw two of
the worst famines, but repeated visitations of widespread and
fatal epidemics. It is estimated that during the ten years ending
December, 1903, a million and a half of deaths were caused by the
bubonic plague alone, and that the mortality from that pestilence
was small in comparison with that caused by cholera, fever and
famine. The effects of those epidemics had been to hamper trade,
to alarm and demoralize the people, to obstruct foreign commerce,
prevent investments and the development of material resources.
Yet during the years 1902 and 1903 throughout all India there
was abundant prosperity. This restoration of prosperity is most
noticeable in several of the districts that suffered most severely
from famine. To a large measure the agricultural population have
been restored to their normal condition.

It is difficult in a great country like India where wages are
so small and the cost of living is so insignificant compared
with our own country, to judge accurately of the condition of
the laboring classes. The empire is so vast and so diverse in
all its features that a statement which may accurately apply
to one province will misrepresent another. But, taking one
consideration with another, as the song says, and drawing an
average, it is plainly evident that the peasant population of
India is slowly improving in condition. The scales of wages have
undoubtedly risen; there has been an improvement in the housing
and the feeding of the masses; their sanitary condition has been
radically changed, although they have fought against it, and
the slow but gradual development of the material resources of
the country promises to make the improvement permanent.

The chief source of revenue in India from ancient times has been
a share in the crops of the farmers. The present system has been
handed down through the centuries with very little modification, and
as three-fifths of the people are entirely and directly dependent
upon the cultivation of the land, the whole fabric of society
has been based upon that source of wealth. The census gives
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