lender supplies the capital, and the villagers supply the labor requisite for industrial enterprise. The petty rural bankers are a shrewd class of men. They foresaw that the scanty harvest of 1865 would render cultivation very profitable in 1866, and made their advances on an unusually liberal scale. Land that had lain so long fallow, that the little ridges between the fields were obliterated, was ploughed up, and four millions of eager husbandmen pushed cultivation up dry elevations, and deep into jungles, which had in more prosperous years lain waste. For this year even a meagre crop would be a profitable one. A low class of land, therefore, that in ordinary seasons did not pay the cost and risks of tillage, might be highly remunerative. Never had the September crop been so widely sown, and the least observant traveler could not help being struck with the boundless expanse of green that everywhere spread before him.

Wherever the Anglo-Saxon goes, he carries with him his respect for precedent. Throughout the scarcity it was deemed of the highest importance to know what measures had been adopted in previous dearths, and the Indian journals from time to time displayed considerable research in their comparisons between the present dearth and the famine of 1769. It did not appear that prices materially differed during the two calamities. Throughout the sea-board districts grain sold, during several months in 1866, at threepence a pound, and this seems to have been the maximum price reached in 1769-70. In several isolated places during both famines food was not to be procured at any prices. In both cases the rural population had flocked towards the great towns, and in 1866, as in 1769, many aged and diseased persons had sunk from exhaustion on the roads.

Here, however, the analogy ceased. Some of the measures for meeting the famine of 1866 had proved inefficient, but in 1769 no measures whatever had been taken. In 1769 the torrent of migration towards the cities had gone on unchecked. Hundreds of thousands had died upon the streets, and thousands had torn one another to pieces in the scramble for food at rich men's doors. In 1866 a series of relief-depots had been organ

ized to act as breakwaters along the routes leading to the capital. Within a hundred miles of Calcutta, on the great north road, three immense hospices had been set up; one at Kaneegunge, one at Burdwan, and one at Hooghly. In order the more effectually to counteract the displacement of the population, a system was also organized for sending back paupers from Calcutta to their homes, charging their subsistence in the meanwhile partly to the relief committee of their district, partly to the central committee in the capital. But the most conspicuous difference was to be found in the state of agriculture. The famine of 1769 left one-third of the province waste. The uncultivated land speedily relapsed into jungle, the jungle soon teemed with tigers, and the human population, gradually driven in from the outlying parts, gathered together towards the centres of the districts. Every volume of the ancient manuscript records bears witness to the battle that raged between man and the wild beasts. In districts where not even a tiger can now be found, a still more formidable enemy, the wild elephant, roamed in herds from village to village, throwing down the houses, lifting off the roofs of granaries, trampling the crops, and crushing everything that opposed him. Even the charcoal-burners, who for generations had faced the tiger, fled before the rush of the wild elephant, and their forest hamlets appear in the revenue returns subsequent to 1770 as deserted. One magistrate on an official tour casually noticed that forty parishes (purgunnahs) had been depopulated by these animals; and a collector plainly told Sir John Shore that, unless their depredations were promptly checked, it would be impossible to collect the landtax. The lieutenants in charge of the north road drew a certain allowance per mile for keeping it free from tigers, and throughout the districts in the vicinity of the metropolis, the sums disbursed to huntsmen for bringing in the heads of wild beasts formed an important item in the accounts of the local treasuries.

In 1866, on the other hand, the first effect of the famine was greatly to extend cultivation. Square miles of arid country, which up to the spring of that year had borne nothing but sal-scrub, were

waving with rice-crops in August, and the prosperity of the husbandmen in the midst of the general distress afforded a plausible argument to the advocate of petite culture; for in order that the land might be cultivated, the cultivators had to be fed. The blessed difference between the present and former famines is, that a class of rural capitalists existed to feed them. In 1769 the husbandmen had died of starvation, and his land had gone out of tillage for want of seed; in 1866 money-lenders were anxious to advance food, landlords were willing to remit rents, on consideration of obtaining a share of the crop at harvest time.

Both calamities altered for a time the relation of agricultural labor to capital. The cultivator became a subject of competition. The famine of 1769 left more land than the remnant of the population could till. Landlords began to entice away tenants from their neighbors' estates. The husbandman could get land at a lower rent from the adjoining proprietors than from the proprietor on whose estate he lived. A numerous class of non-resident tenants developed, each collector espoused the cause of the landholders within his own jurisdiction, and the mutual jealousies which resulted in terrupted the execution of writs even during the firm administration of Lord Cornwallis. In the famine of 1866, the village capitalists thought it their interest to extend the area of tillage; the number of husbandmen did not increase with the increased demand for them, and agricultural labor found itself in a position to make its bargain with capital on improved terms.

In truth, the money-lenders had no choice but to support the husbandmen. The failure of the crops of 1865 had rendered it impossible for the cultivator to repay the advances of that year; the few sheaves that he reaped were hypothecated to the landholder for the rent; and the capitalist had the alternative of deserting the husbandman and writing off the advances of 1865 as bad debts, or of continuing to support him for another year, and taking the chance of having the whole repaid, with interest, out of the harvest of 1866.

After July prices gradually declined, but the distress rapidly increased. The

September harvest had become a matter of certainty; speculators knew it was useless to hold back on the contingency of higher prices in 1867, and poured their stores into the market. Yet the pauper population grew at a rate that baffled the calculations of the relief committees. Each of these bodies had submitted an estimate of the sum it would require from the public purse. The amount had been placed at its disposal, but many committees now found it necessary to apply for additional grants; and in one case the discrepancy between the estimated and the actual requirements proved so great, that a commissioner was specially deputed to inquire into the causes of the miscalculation. These causes are now clear. The rains had put a stop to most kinds of rural industry. Tankdigging became impossible, when the tanks were filled with ten feet of water. It was useless to work on embankments when the rain washed the earth down faster than it could be heaped up; and out of the question to attempt to clear lands on which a new crop of jungle would grow rank in a week. The impetus that the rains at first gave to husbandry had for a time more than compensated for the cessation of the other undertakings. But before the end of July the ploughing and transplanting had been finished, and the multitude of additional laborers to whom these processes had given employment were again adrift.

Pestilence also began to tell heavily upon the underfed population. The fevers which make their appearance annually at the end of the rains this year assumed a particularly virulent type. The laborer frequently ekes out his wages by boiling up a wild herb with his rice; but during the famine, while wandering about in search of work, he had eaten the herb raw, along with the parched grain which forms the viaticum of the poor Bengali. In July dysentery broke out and prepared the way for a yet more terrible disease. Cholera always lurks in the densely crowded lanes of a native town. At an early period in the course of the famine, the attention of the authorities was called to the necessity of strict sanitary precautions, precautions which, a few years ago, would have required the sanction of a special law, but for which

has been cooked by a man belonging to a caste inferior to his own, or which, after cooking, has passed through such a man's hands, he becomes unclean, and can regain his position only by costly of ferings. Some Brahmans, indeed, claim descent from ancestors of such quality that no breach of the ceremonial code can touch their inherent purity, and Anglo-Indians were recently amused by the vagaries of a young Bengali nobleman, who ate forbidden meats every evening and purified himself by the mere fiat of his will next morning. But to a respectable Hindu of the middle class, loss of caste has all the terrors that the Interdict had to the Parisian of the reign of Philip Augustus. Even in the jails of Bengal the authorities find it necessary to respect this prejudice, and each caste of felons has a cook for itself. Fortunately, the famine penetrated only a small way upwards among the respectable classes, but those that it did reach suffered much more intensely than the low-born laborer. The well-to-do artisan patiently bore the extremity of hunger rather than perimit the boiled rice from the depot to pass his lips. His younger children, who had not been inducted into the caste, might frequent the enclosures, but his wife and grown-up sons were forced rigidly to abstain. Many of the adults got over the difficulty by flying to the cities and merging their individuality among the multitude of paupers; indeed it was no secret that even the Brahmans under such circumstances threw off all restraint; but to the very last, village opinion and ancient prejudice proved too strong for those that remained at home. The writer urged a family in the last stage of voluntary starvation to take advantage of the State charity. "What!" replied one of them who could not stand erect from weekness, "shall I eat the impure food in the presence of my wife and of my father?"

On the other hand, if unboiled rice had been distributed, a large proportion of the recipients would have devoured it raw. Most of them were too poor to buy fuel, and some had passed the boundary which divides extreme hunger from mania. Uncooked rice, particularly in stomachs irritated by long-continued fasting, brings on a fatal disease, and it seemed

better that the respectable few should endure their voluntary sufferings than that the multitude should die. A middle course existed, indeed, but it does not appear to have been anywhere adopted. The paupers had been classified with respect to their ability to work, they might also have been classified on a basis of caste. The majority consisted of daylaborers, who thankfully accepted food without asking through whose hands it had passed; for the minority, belonging to a more scrupulous rank of life, Brahman cooks might have been provided from the jails.

We have described the measures by which the classes whose earnings proved insufficient to procure their daily food were enabled to live through the famine; it remains to mention a few of the most conspicuous effects of the scarcity on the people at large. The population became visibly weaker. An extensive indigoplanter complained that although he gave his vat-men rations in addition to their daily wages, they were unable to beat the stalks with the necessary force, and left much of the dye unextracted. The trade in all manner of luxuries ceased, and the artisans whose business it is to produce them found themselves worse off than the unskilled laborer. Silk-weaving communities are numerous throughout the famine-stricken districts, and their beautiful fabrics were altogether unsaleable. A few of them obtained employment, through the relief committees, from benevolent firms in Calcutta, but many fled to the towns, and the money-lenders refused advances upon the implements of manufacture to those who remained; for if a weaver should eventually migrate, there was no one to take his place, and his loom became valueless. The most painful feature in the famine was the patient despair of these poor artisans.

Crime greatly increased. Throughout the famine every jail was filled to overflowing; huts had been erected first inside, then outside the walls, but these soon become unable to hold the multitude of prisoners, and a sort of convict camp had to be resorted to. Notwithstanding the increased number of guards, serious outbreaks took place, and the apprehension of a rush against the gates