gratefully contrasts the present with the past in the peace, security, and prosperity of the people of the great Gangetic Valley, and ascribes it all to the beneficence of English rule. This impartial witness says:
“The public works of Hindoos were for the comfort only of the physical man. The Mohammedans exhibit but the same care for the material well-being, without any progress made by humanity toward the amelioration of its moral condition. Far otherwise are the public works of the English. Their schools and colleges, literary institutions, public libraries, museums, botanic gardens, are proofs of a greater intellectual state of the world than in any preceding age. Supposing the English were to quit India, the beneficence of their rule ought not to be judged of by the external memorials of stone and masonry left behind them, but by the emancipation of our nation from prejudices and superstitions of long standing, and by the enlightened state in which they shall leave India. In the words of De Quincey, ‘higher by far than the Mogul gift of limestone, or traveling stations, or even roads and tanks, were the gifts of security, of peace, of law, and settled order.’
“Nothing afforded me so great a pleasure as to pass through a country of one wide and uninterrupted cultivation, in which paddy-fields, that have justly made our country to be called the granary of the world, extended for miles in every direction. No such prospect greeted the eyes of a traveler in 1758. Then the annual inroads of the Mahrattas, the troubles following the overthrow of the Mohammedan dynasty, frequent and severe famines, and virulent pestilences, had thinned the population, and reduced fertile districts to wastes and jungles. It is on record that previous to 1793, the year of the English Permanent Settlement, one third of Lower Bengal lay waste and uncultivated. Never, perhaps, has Bengal enjoyed such a long period of peace without interruption as under British rule. From the day of the battle of Plassey no enemy has left a footprint upon her soil, no peasant has lost a sheaf of grain, and no man a single drop of blood. Under security
