ow? Because
I've tramped on foot, or warrant pretty well from one end of the place
to the other, an' I know what I'm talkin' about, and this 'ere Guv'ment
goes peckin' an' fiddlin' over its tuppenny-ha'penny little taxes as if
it was afraid. Which it is. You see how they do things in ----. It's six
sowars here, and ten sowars there, and--'Pay up, you brutes, or we'll
pull your ears over your head.' And when they've taken all they can get,
the headman, he says: 'This is a dashed poor yield. I'll come again.'
_Of course_ the people digs up something out of the ground, and they
pay. I know the way it's done, and that's the way to do it. You can't go
to an Injian an' say: 'Look here. Can you pay me five rupees?' He says:
'_Garib admi_,' of course, an' would say it if he was as rich as banker.
But if you send half a dozen swords at him and shift the thatch off of
his roof, he'll pay. Guv'ment can't do that. I don't suppose it could.
There is no reason why it shouldn't. But it might do something like it,
to show that it wasn't going to have no nonsense. Why, I'd undertake to
raise a hundred million--what am I talking of?--a hundred and fifty
million pounds from this country _per annum_, and it wouldn't be
strained _then_. One hundred and fifty millions you could raise as easy
as paint, if you just made these 'ere Injians understand that they had
to pay an' make no bones about it. It's enough to make a man sick to go
in over yonder to ---- and see what they do; and then come back an' see
what we do. Perfectly sickenin' it is. Borrer money? Why the country
could pay herself an' everything she wants, if she was only made to do
it. It's this blooomin' _Garib admi_ swindle that's been going on all
these years, that has made fools o' the Guv'ment."

Then he became egotistical, this ragged ruffian who conceived that he
knew the road to illimitable wealth and told the story of his life,
interspersed with anecdotes that would blister the paper they were
written on. But through all his ravings, he stuck to his
hundred-and-fifty-million theory, and though the listener dissented from
him and the brutal cruelty with which his views were stated, an
unscientific impression remained not to be shaken off. Across the Border
one feels that the country is being used, exploited, "made to sit up,"
so to speak. In our territories the feeling is equally strong of wealth
"just round the corner," as the loafer said, of a people wrapped up in
cotton wo