PEOPLE CEMENTED............INDEPENDENT 47
always remain an open market for British goods. It is this policy which has made India the land of chronic poverty. In this progressive impoverishment of the people who are those that suffer most? I am sure that of the half of the agricultural population which is admitted not to know from one half year’s end to another what it is to have a full meal the Depressed Classes must form the largest part. Their abject poverty must make them ready victims of famines to which they must be paying the largest toll. If these are your people, if you are really interested in them you cannot shut your eyes or be indifferent to this heart-rending fact. Gentlemen, you cannot keep on singing the praise of a bureaucracy because it has given improved roads, constructed canals on more scientific principles, effected transportation by rail, contrived to carry letters by penny post and flash messages by lightening, has stabilized currency, regulated weights and measures, corrected the prevalent notions of theology, geography, astronomy and medicine and stopped our internal quarrels. All praise is due to this achievement in the field of law and order. But Gentlemen, we must not forget that people including the Depressed Classes do not live on law and order; what they live on is bread and butter. This inexorable law of life must make even the Depressed Classes demand a government that will help the economic prosperity of the country and thereby effect a betterment in their material life. Some of you may question that the poverty of the people is due to lack of production and may urge that it is due to unequal distribution of wealth. I would be the first to admit that the much talked of “annual tribute” which the people of this country pay to England pales away in magnitude before the heavy exactions by the landlords and capitalists of this country from the paltry and hard-earned wages of the masses who toil for them. But I cannot understand how you can expect the British Government to give relief from the crushing weight of the landlords and the capitalists ? One thing we must remember that every Government however powerful suffers as pointed out by Professor Dicey from two very serious limitations. There is first of all an internal limitation which arises from the character, motives and interests of those who are in power and if the British