INDIA ON THE EVE OF CROWN GOVERNMENT 71
system of Government should be such an abasement of a whole people.
Mr. Martin in his “Eastern India” 1838 says, “The annual drain of £3,000,000 on British India has amounted in thirty years, at 12 per cent (the usual Indian rate) compound interest, to the enormous sum of £723,900,000 sterling ... So constant and accumulating a drain, even in England, would soon impoverish her. How severe, then, must be its effects on India, where the wage of a labourer is from two pence to three pence a day ! Were the hundred millions of British subjects in India converted into a consumpting population, what a market would be presented for British capital, skill and industry! ” Mr. Frederick John Shore of the Bengal Civil Service very pathetically said:
“But the halcyon days of India are over; she has been drained of a large proportion of the wealth she once possessed, and her energies have been cramped by a sordid system of misrule to which the interest of millions have been sacrificed for the benefit of the few. The gradual impoverishment of the people and the country, under the mode of rule established by the English Government has.... the grinding extortions of the English Government have effected the impoverishment of the country and people to an extent almost unparalleled…….. ”
“The fundamental principle of the English had been to make the whole Indian Nation subservient in every possible way to the interest and benefit of themselves…….. Had the welfare of the people been our object, a very different course would have been adopted, and a very different result would have followed.”
But such was not to be the case. Nay, it would have been unnatural had it been otherwise, for Mill says, “the Government of a people by itself has a meaning and a reality ; but such a thing as Government of one people by another does not, and cannot exist. One people may keep another for its own use, a place to make money in, a human cattle-farm to be worked for the profits of its own inhabitants.”
The administration of the East India Company was a prototype of the Roman provincial administration, under the Roman Empire, however, local liberties were conserved. Monesen says, “The Roman provincial constitution, in substance, only concentrated military power in the hands of the Roman Governor,