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THE GREAT FAMINE OF M.DCC.LXX.

government, oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism, was strong with all the strength of civilization. It resembled the government of evil Genii, rather than the government of human tyrants. Even despair could not inspire the soft Bengalee with courage to confront men of English breed, the hereditary nobility of mankind, whose skill and valor had so often triumphed in spite of ten-fold odds. The unhappy race never attempted resistance. Sometimes they submitted in patient misery. Sometimes they fled from the white man, as their fathers had been used to fly from the Mahratta; and the palanquin of the English traveler was often carried through silent villages and towns, which the report of his approach had made desolate. . . Given up to English rapacity, a helpless timid race, who knew not where lay the island which sent forth their oppressors, and whose complaints had little chance of being heard across fifteen thousand miles of ocean."

SUCH

XV.

UCH are a few touches from the pencil which the great artist gives of a country where he had long lived, and whose history he understood so thoroughly.

In speaking of the great famine of 1770, which, beginning with a drouth was rendered ten-fold more frightful by the robberies of rice from the natives, Macaulay says: "The whole valley of the Ganges was filled with misery and death. Tender and delicate women, whose vails had never been lifted before the public gaze, came forth from the inner chambers in which Eastern jealousy had kept watch over their beauty, throw themselves on the earth before the passers-by, and with loud wailings, implored a handful of rice for their children. The Hoogley every day rolled down thousands of corpses close to the porticoes and gardens of the English conquerors. The very streets of Calcutta were blackened up by the dying and the dead. The lean and feeble survivors had not energy enough to bear the bodies of their kindred to the funereal pile, or to

INFAMOUS CHARACTER OF HASTINGS.

445

the holy river, or even to scare away the jackals and vultures who fed on human remains in the face of day. The extent of the mortality was never ascertained; but it was popularly reckoned by millions."

Macaulay affects to doubt the universal rumor that the chief horrors of the famine were caused by the Company's servants engrossing all the rice of the country. But so careful and well informed a man as the great Adam Smith did not doubt it. Nor was it ever denied that scores of colossal fortunes were made during that frightful famine, by the agents of the Company, through vast exportations of rice; nor that through the whole of that frightful period the warehouses of the Company at Calcutta were bursting with rice. Nor was Lord Chatham likely to be deceived; and “during," Macaulay acknowledges, "the short period of his ascendency in the councils of George III. had meditated a bold attack on the Company. But his plans were rendered abortive by the strange malady which about that time began to overcloud his splendid genius."

XVI.

[N summing up the character of Warren Hastings-the might

eloquence of Burke have transmitted to everlasting infamyMacaulay vainly tries to rescue his hero. "With all his faults -and they were neither few nor small—only one cemetery was worthy to contain his remains. In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the Great Abbey, which has, during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall, the dust of the illustrious accused should have mingled with the dust of the illustrious accusers."

This is bold and shameless eulogy of a man of whom Burke said, in closing the exordium of the impeachment: "Therefore hath it with all confidence been ordered by the Commons of

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HONORS TO HASTINGS.

Great Britain, that I impeach Warren Hastings of high crimes and misdemeanors. I impeach him in the name of the Commons' House of Parliament, whose trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of the English nation, whose ancient honor he has sullied. I impeach him in the name of India, whose rights he has trodden under foot, and whose country he has turned into a desert. Lastly, in the name of human nature itself, in the name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in the name of every rank, I impeach the common enemy and oppressor of all!"

For eight long years, in this most celebrated criminal trial of all ages, the scroll of Hastings' crimes was unrolled-in vain. He was acquitted, and all the honors England could heap upon his head, except a peerage, were lavished. The East India Company, which he had enriched during thirteen years with upwards of fifty million dollars-most of it the bloodstained fruit of the most heartless cruelty and unblushing crime-settled a princely pension upon him, in token of their approbation and gratitude, and the English government and the English people approved the act.

Macaulay's chief apology for his unwarrantable exculpation of Hastings was, that, while in the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, the surrender of the right of legislating for Ireland, the restoration of Minorca and Florida to Spain, and Senegal, Goree, and several West Indian Islands to France, the only quarter of the world in which Britain had lost nothing was the quarter in which her interests had been committed to the care of Hastings. And how had he served India? By means so atrocious, that to recall them sends an Arctic chill through the veins of any civilized man! England never has had any public conscience in her robbery and slaughter of weaker nations. The enriching of her upper classes, and the aggrandizement of her empire, have fixed the standard of her public morality and justice.

RAIL ROADS AND TELEGRAPHS.

447

XVII.

SUCH

UCH was India, and such were her masters for upwards of two hundred and fifty years.

Since the abolition of the East India Company, which went down before the indignation of the British people, a new impetus has been given to the progress of civilization in India; and considering the ponderable mass of nearly two hundred millions of people, upon whom the mighty effort was to be made, some of the curses of the British rule have been removed, although the actual suffering of the East Indian nations under the galling yoke of Britain have in some respects been augmented.

Over the most important routes of the Empire, railways and telegraphs have been projected, of which 1,630 miles were opened up to May, 1862; since when, over 1,500 miles have been completed, with some 5,000 or 6,000 miles of telegraphic communication. These lines of railway consist in a great trunk road from Bombay to Calcutta, across the hitherto closed tracks of Central India, bringing the capital of the empire five days nearer to England. A few more years without interruption, by means of branch railways, tramways and roads, will give a compactness and unity to the empire, which will immensely promote facilities for the introduction and spread of civilization. The line from Calcutta to Delhi, being the trunk line of the Gangetic Valley, is being traversed, while the Bombay line will be completed to the city of Najpore. Less opposition has been made to railroads and telegraphs in India than to any other of the invasions of civilization, and as stated by Dr. Mullens," with scarcely one grumble of opposition.'

Three thousand miles of wire were erected above ground in the course of two years, at a cost of £200,000, sterling. "The lines had to cross, by cables, seventy large rivers; to traverse tracks of rocks and mountain, sand and loam; to pass through miles of dense jungle, where wild animals and deadly fevers had

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INEXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCES OF INDIA.

their haunt; but the work was prosecuted with energy and success, and the lines now embrace all the great towns of the Empire." The improvement and laying out of common roads in India, received a great impetus from the demand for cotton which compelled their construction, and the rapid completion of railways which made them feeders of the more rapid system. Steamers have been greatly multiplied on the river Ganges, and have made their appearance on the Indus and other principal streams. Within the last decade, the Ganges canal has been completed, with its branches, to a length of nine hundred miles, and its great success has led to the planning of other canals for the dry tracks that border on the Punjab, etc. The subjoined figures, which I take from Dr. Mullens' book, show an increase in the entire trade of India, from 1834, when it was fourteen millions of pounds sterling, to 1862, when it rose to nearly one hundred millions sterling.

XVIII.

HE inexhaustible resources of India, especially in rice, silk, sugar, indigo, tea, jute and cotton, may be indicated by the quantity sent to England in 1862, which exceeded twenty-five millions sterling. The motive of profit has been so great, that during the last few years an enormous amount of money has been thrown into that country from England. All native produce has increased in price, land and labor have risen in value enormously; "and were the interests of classes rightly adjusted, the multitudes of peasantry, by whose toil this produce is raised, would obtain a larger share of its enhanced value than they now enjoy. A valuable illustration of these benefits is seen in the fact that, even under the Ryot system of Madras, since the reduction of the land tax, the government rent revenue has increased one million sterling in five years, and the trade has risen from seven to ten millions sterling."*

* Dr. Joseph Mullens was sent out as a missionary of the London Missionary Society in Calcutta some twelve years ago, and his work, published in 1864, in