true as to state that the 67,000,000l. ¿ rental in the United Kingdom is a special tax on the farmers of this cory. The amount derived from excise is chiefly produced by the sale of intoxicating liquors, the use of which is forbidden by the social and religious views or the natives; and any contribution to the revenue under this head is early a voluntary act on the part of the transgressor. The revenue rem stamps proceeds chiefly from what may be called taxes on justice; they are, in my opinion, extremely objectionable, but weighty objections may be urged. against nearly every tax, and a large portion of this tax falls on the wealthier class of suitors. The amount contributed by the population under the head of customs, although it may take money out of the pocket of the rayat, actually adds to his store; for, unless he could buy in the bazaar a piece of Manchester long-cloth cheaper than an article of domestic manufacture, it is manifest that he would select the latter. There remains only the single article of salt on which the cultivator undoubtedly is taxed, and which forms the sole tax from which he cannot escape. This tax also is extremely objectionable in theory, more perhaps than in practice, for it amounts to about 74d. per head. But even if we take the whole amount of taxation as shown by Mr. Hyndman, excluding the land revenue or rental of the land, the average per head is only 18. 6d., of which more than one-third can be avoided at the pleasure of any individual consumer. It is not, then, a misstatement to aver that the population of India is more lightly taxed than any population in the world living under an orderly government. I have thus far thought it my duty to expose what I believe to be grave errors in Mr. Hyndman's sensational article. But I should do him great injustice if I did not admit that he has brought out in vivid colours some very important facts. It is true that these facts are well known to Indian administrators, but they are facts disagreeable to contemplate, and are therefore slurred over willingly; but they have such important bearing on the proceedings of Government in India that they cannot be too frequently paraded before the public eye. The first of these truths is the undeniable poverty of the great bulk of the population. But here Mr. Hyndman does not appear to me to have taken full grasp of the fact, or to have ascertained its causes. The dense population of India, amounting in its more fertile parts to six and seven hundred per square mile, is almost exclusively occupied in agricultural pursuits. But the land of India has been farmed from time immemorial by men entirely without capital. A farmer in this country has little chance of success unless he can supply a capital of 10l. to 201. an acre. If English farms were cultivated by men as deficient in capital as the Indian rayats, they would be all thrown on the parish in a year or two. The founder of a Hindu village may, by aid of his brethren and friends, have strength enough to break up the jungle, dig a well, and with a few rupees in his pocket he may purchase seed for the few acres he can bring under the plough. If a favourable harvest enue, he has a large surplus, out of which he pays the jamma or rent to Government. But on the first failure of the periodical rains his withered crops disappear, he has no capital wherewith to meet the Government demand, to obtain food for his family and stock, or to purchase seed for the coming year. To meet all these wants he must have recourse to the village money-lender, who has always formed as indispensable a member of a Hindu agricultural community as the ploughman himself. From time immemorial the cultivator of the soil in India has lived from hand to mouth, and when his hand could not supply his mouth from the stores of the last harvest he has been driven to the local saukár or money-lender to obtain the means of existence. This is the first great cause of India's poverty. The second is akin to it, for it exists in the infinite divisibility of property which arises under the Hindu system of succession, and which throws insuperable obstructions to the growth of capital. The rule as to property in Hindu life is that all the members of a family, father, grandfather, children, and grandchildren, constitute an undivided partnership, having equal shares in the property, although one of them, generally the eldest, is recognised as the manager. It is in the power of any member to sever himself from the family group, and the tendency of our Government has been to encourage efforts of what may be called individualism. But the new stock is but the commencement of another undivided family, so strong is the Hindu feeling in favour of this timehonoured custom. It is obvious that where the skill, foresight, and thriftiness required for the creation of capital may be thwarted by the extravagance or carelessness of any one of a large number of partners, its growth must be seriously impeded. It will be seen, if the above arguments are sound, that the obstructions which oppose themselves to the formation of capital arise out of immemorial usages, and are irremediable by any direct interference of Government. But whatever may be the causes of this national poverty, the fact is undoubted, and it cannot be too steadily contemplated by those who desire to rely on fresh taxation for their favourite projects, whether it be for improved administration, for magnificent public works, or for the extension of our dominions. Mr. Hyndman also points out the great expensiveness of a foreign government, and his remarks on this subject are undoubtedly true. The high salaries required to tempt Englishmen of suitable qualifications to expatriate themselves for the better part of their lives, and the heavy dead weight of pensions and furlough charges for such officials, form, no doubt, a heavy burden on the resources of India. The costliness of a European army is, of course, also undoubtedly great. But these are charges which, to a less or greater degree, are inseparable from the dominion of a foreign government. The compensation for them is to be found in the security they provide against a foreign invader or against internal disturbances, and the protection they afford, in a degree hitherto unknown in India, to life, property, and character. But Mr. Hyndman's diatribes are useful in pointing to the conclusion that all the efforts of Government should be directed towards the diminution of these charges, where compatible with efficiency, and his striking contrast of the home military charges in 1862-63, which then amounted to 281. 38., and now have risen in the present year to 661., deserves most serious consideration. There is only one other statement of Mr. Hyndman which I desire to notice. He declares the general opinion of the natives to be that life, as a whole, has become harder since the English took the country, and he adds his own opinion that the fact is so. Mr. Hyndman, as we have seen, knows but little of the actual life of the agricultural population, and of their state under native rule he probably knows less. But I am inclined to think he fairly represents a very prevailing belief amongst the natives. A vivid indication of this native feeling is given in the most instructive work on Hindu rural life that I have ever met with.* Colonel Sleeman thus recounts a conversation he held with some natives in one of his rambles I got an old landowner from one of the villages to walk on with me a mile and put me in the right road. I asked him what had been the state of the country under the former government of the Jâts and Mahrattas, and was told that the greater part was a wird jungle. "I remember," said the old man, "when you could not have got out of the road hereabouts without a good deal of risk. I could not have ventured a hundred yards from the village without the chance of having my clothes stripped off my back. Now the whole country is under cultivation, and the roads are safe. Formerly the governments kept no faith with their landowners and cultivators, eacting ten rupees where they had bargained for five whenever they found their crops good. But in spite of all this zulm (oppression) there was then more barkul (blessings from above) than now; the lands yielded more to the cultivator." Colonel Sleeman on the same day asked a respectable farmer what he thought of the latter statement. He stated: "The diminished fertility is owing, no doubt, to the want of those salutary fallows which the fields got under former governments, when invasions and civil wars were things of common occurrence, and kept at least two-thirds of the land waste." The fact is that, under an orderly government like ours, the causes alluded to above as impeding the growth of capital become very much aggravated. Population largely increases, waste lands are brought under the plough, grazing grounds for stock disappear, and the fallows, formerly so beneficial in restoring fertility to the soil, can no longer be kept free from cultivation. All these considerations form portions of the very difficult problems in government which day by day present themselves to the Indian administrator. But does Mr. Hyndman think they are to be solved by recurrence to the native system of government; by the substitution of a local rule, sometimes paternal, more frequently the reverse, for the courts of justice which now administer the law which can be read and understood by all; by civil contracts being enforced by the armed servant of the creditor, instead of by the * Rambles of an Indian Official, 1844) officers of a court acting under strict surveillance; by the land assessment being collected year by year through the farmers of the revenue according to their arbitrary will, instead of being payable in a small moderate* sum, unalterable for a long term of years? If he thinks this and his allusion to the system of the non-regulation provinces favours the conclusion-he will not find, I think, an educated native in the whole of India who will agree with him. There are great harshnesses in our rule, there is a rigidity and exactitude of procedure which is often distasteful to native opinion, there are patent defects arising out of our attempts to administer justice, there is great irritation at our constant and often ill-conceived experiments in legislation, there is real danger in the fresh burdens we lay upon the people in our desire to carry out apparently laudable reforms. But with all these blemishes, which have only to be distinctly perceived to be removed from our administrative system, the educated native feels that he is gradually acquiring the position of a freeman, and he would not exchange it for that which Mr. Hyndman appears to desiderate. E. PERRY, in Nineteenth Century. A COUP D'ÉTAT. Ir little seeds by slow degree Put forth their leaves and flowers unheard, Our love had grown into a tree, And bloomed without a single word I haply hit on six o'clock, The hour her father came from town; I gave his own peculiar knock, And waited slyly, like a clown. The door was open. There she stood, I took the kiss she meant for him. A moment on an awful brink Deep breath, a frown, a smile, a tear; [London Society. *So long ago as the period when Colonel Sleeman wrote, the principle was fully established as to the moderation to be observed in the Government assessment. He says: "We may rate the Government share at one-fifth as the maximum and onetenth as the minimum of the gross produce." (Rambles of an Indian Official, vol. i. p. 251.) In the Blue Book laid before Parliament last Session on the Deccan riots, it will be seen that the Government share in the gross produce of those districts where a high assessment was supposed to have created the disturbances was only one-thirteenth, THEATRICAL MAKE-SHIFTS AND BLUNDERS. It is a generally received opinion that all stage wardrobes are made up of tawdry rags, and that the landscapes and palaces that look so charming by gaslight are but mere daubs by day. But there are wardrobes and wardrobes, scenery and scenery. The dresses used for some great get up" at the opera houses, or at the principal London and provincial theatres, are costly and magnificent; the scenery, although painted for distance and artificial light, is really the product of artists of talent, and there is an attention to reality in all the adjuncts that would quite startle the believers in the tinsel and tawdry view. A millionaire might take a lesson from the stage drawing-rooms of the Prince of Wales and the Court theatres, and no cost is spared to procure the real article, whatever it may be, that is required for the scene. These minutiae of realism, however, are quite a modern idea, dating no farther back than the days of Boucicault and Fechter. Splendid scenery and gorgeous dresses for the legitimate dramas were introduced by John Kemble, aud developed to the utmost extent by Macready and Kean; but it was reserved for the present decade to lavish the same attention and expenses upon the petite drama. Half a century ago the property maker manufactured the stage furniture, the stage books, the candelabra, curtains, cloths, pictures, &c., out of papier mache and tinsel; and the drawingroom or library of a gentleman's mansion thus presented bore as much resemblance to the reality as sea-side furnished lodgings do to a ducal palace. Before the Kemble time a green baize, a couple of chairs and a table, sufficed for all furnishing purposes, whether for an inn or a palace. In these days of "theatrical upholstery," we can scarcely realize the shabbiness of the stage of the last century. There were a few handsome suits for the principal actors, but the less important ones were frequently dressed in costumes that had done service for fifty years, until they were worn threadbare and frequently in rags. Endeavour to realise upon the modern stage such a picture as this given by Tate Wilkinson, of his appearance at Covent Garden as "The Fine Gentleman," in "Lethe." "A very short old suit of clothes, with a black velvet ground, and broad, gold flowers as dingy as the twentyfour letters on a piece of gingerbread; it had not seen the light since the first year Garrick played Lothario,' at the theatre. Bedecked in that sable array for the modern Fine Gentleman,' and to make the appearance complete, I added an old red surtout, trimmed with a dingy white fur, and a deep skinned cape of the same hue, borrowed by old Giffard, I was informed, at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, to play King Lear' in." When West Digges appeared at the Hay |