Page:Indian Journal of Economics Volume 2.djvu/158

146 GILBERT SLATER and to what extent they are the consequence of poverty among the people which prevents them from ha?qng sufficient resources to survive a failure of crops. When it became estimated that the known in England that it average Indian income was only spokesmen generally known told that Indian poverty was answer was readily supplied of Indian opinion who made in England. We were due to the exactions of the land revenue, . that its amount was so heavy as to crnsh the peasants into poverty, and that periodical resettlements took away from the peasant all feeling of security and caused him to shrink from expending labor and capital on improving his holding, and that the remedy for Iudi?n poverty was to extend Perma- nent Settlement over tl?e whole land. , I am bound to sa.y that I found it hard to (?redit th? explanation even ?n England; and that the system of permanent sett. le,nent, particularly as carried out in Bengal, appeared to me to have all the vices of our landlord system in England, which practically all people excep? the landlords themselves are agreed is in need of ?'ery drastic reform, and of reform which would make it much system with periodical more similar to the ryotwari resettlement. However it was easy to see that if the land revenue exacted were so high as to exceed the economic rent of the land, or if it were levied in such a way a.s to deprive the ryot of any motive of disastrous, and a The questign was, improving the land it must be potent cause of poverty in India, whether these things were so as a matter of actual fact ? To this question through the their views about ?2 per head, this question was to some ex?nt answered, but one was faced with the further question as to what was the cause of this intensity of poverty, exceeding that to be found in any other civilized cormtry,