England's Debt to India: A Historical Narrative of Britain's Fiscal Policy in India

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B. W. Huebsch, 1917 - British - 362 pages
 

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Page 224 - The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything that they want within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations. They seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down : revolution succeeds to revolution; Hindu, Pathan, Moghul, Mahratta, Sikh, English are masters in turn ; but the village communities remain the same...
Page 224 - This union of the village communities, each one forming a separate little state in itself, has, I conceive, contributed more than any other cause to the preservation of the people of India, through all the revolutions and changes which they have suffered, and is in a high degree conducive to their happiness, and to the enjoyment of a great portion of freedom and independence.
Page 71 - It must give pain to an Englishman to have reason to think that since the accession of the Company to the Dewani the condition of the people of this country has been worse than it was before, and yet I am afraid the fact is undoubted....
Page 224 - Community collect their cattle within their walls, and let the enemy pass unprovoked. If plunder and devastation be directed against themselves and the force employed be irresistible, they flee to friendly villages at a distance, but when the storm has passed over they return and resume their occupations.
Page 204 - The inhabitants gave themselves no trouble about the breaking up and divisions of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves; its internal economy remains unchanged.
Page 203 - A village, geographically considered, is a tract of country comprising some hundred or thousand acres of arable and waste lands: politically viewed it resembles a corporation or township.
Page 262 - But millions of peasants in India are struggling to live on half an acre. Their existence is a constant struggle with starvation, ending too often in defeat. Their difficulty is not to live human lives — lives up to the level of their poor standard of comfort — but to live at all and not die.
Page 73 - The fundamental principle of the English had been to make the whole Indian nation subservient, in every possible way, to the interests and benefits of themselves. They have been taxed to the utmost limit; every successive Province, as it has fallen into our possession, has been made a field for higher exaction; and it has always been our boast how greatly we have raised the revenue above that which the native rulers were able to extort. The Indians have been excluded from every honour, dignity, or...
Page 76 - Taxes spent in the country from which they are raised are totally different in their effects from taxes raised in one country and spent in another. In the former case the taxes collected from the population at large are paid away to the portion of the population engaged in the service of Government, through whose expenditure they are again returned to the industrious classes. They occasion a different distribution, but no loss of national income...
Page 137 - The sympathy of the Court is deeply excited by the report of the Board of Trade, exhibiting the gloomy picture of the effects of a commercial revolution productive of so much present suffering to numerous classes in India, and hardly to be paralleled in the history of commerce."] 1 But Mr.

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