igate the
hardships of periodical famines unavoidable in regions where a
predominantly agricultural population is largely dependent for existence
on the varying abundance or shortage of the seasonal rainfalls. The
incidence and methods of collection of the land-tax, the backbone of
Indian revenue, were carefully corrected and perfected, and the burden
of taxation readjusted and on the whole lightened. Those were the days
of _laisser-faire_, _laisser-aller_ at home, and it was not deemed to
be part of the duties of government to give any special protection to
Indian commerce, whilst the operation of free trade principles in India
checked the industrial development of the country. Nevertheless the
internal and external trade of India expanded continually, and the
cotton mills in Western India, and the jute mills in Calcutta, as well
as the opening up of coal mines in Bengal and of gold mines in Southern
India showed how great were the natural resources of the peninsula still
awaiting development; and under Lord Curzon's administration, which
reached during the first years of the present century the high-water
mark of efficiency, a department was created to deal specially with
commerce and industry. In spite of several famines of unusual intensity
and of the appearance in India in 1896 of a new scourge in the shape of
the bubonic plague, which has carried off since then over eight million
people, the population increased by leaps and bounds, and the census of
1901 showed it to have reached in our Indian Empire the huge figure of
nearly 300,000,000--which it has since then exceeded by another
20,000,000--or about a fifth of the estimated population of the whole
globe. It had risen since the first census officially recorded in 1871
by nearly 30 per cent--no mean evidence that fifty years of peaceful and
efficient administration had produced an increased sense of welfare and
confidence.

The great bulk of the population, mostly a simple and ignorant peasantry
whose horizon does not extend beyond their own village and the fields
that surround it, accepted with more or less conscious gratitude the
material benefits conferred upon them by alien rulers with whom they
were seldom brought into actual contact save through the occasional
presence of a District officer on tour, almost invariably humane and
kindly and anxious to do even-handed justice to all. Another class of
Indians, chiefly dwellers in large cities, infinitesimally s