The tendency toward the transfer of English capital to India, as he informs us, retrogrades instead of advancing, and this is precisely what we might expect to find to be the case. _Capital never seeks a country from which men are flying as they now fly from India._ The English houses bring none, but being in general mere speculators, they borrow largely and enter into large operations, and when the bubble bursts, the poor Hindoo suffers in the prostration of trade and decline in the prices of cotton and sugar. "The consequence is," as Mr. Campbell says--
"That European speculation has retrograded. Far up the country, where the agents of the old houses were formerly numerous and well supplied with money, the planters are now few and needy, and generally earn but a precarious subsistence as in fact the servants of native capitalists."--P. 204.
Iron, by aid of which the people might improve their processes of cultivation and manufacture, has little tendency toward India. The average export of it to that country in 1845 and '46 was but 13,000 tons, value £160,000, or about two-pence worth for every five of the population. Efforts are now being made for the construction of railroads, but their object is that of carrying out the system of centralization, and thus still further destroying the power of association, because they look to the annihilation of what still remains of domestic manufacture, and thus _cheapening cotton_. With all the improvements in the transportation of that commodity, its poor cultivator obtains less for it than he did thirty years since, and the effect of further improvement can be none other than that of producing a still further reduction, and still further deterioration of the condition of the men who raise food and cotton. As yet the power of association continues in the Punjab, but it is proposed now to hold there great fairs for the sale of English manufactures, and the day cannot be far distant when the condition of the people of the new provinces will be similar to that of those of the old ones, as no effort will be spared to carry out the system which looks to driving the whole people to agriculture, and thus compelling them to exhaust their land. It is needed, says Mr. Chapman, the great advocate of railways in India, that the connection between "the Indian grower and English spinner" become more intimate, and "_the more the English is made to outweigh the native home demand, the more strongly will the native agriculturist feel that his personal success depends on securing and improving his British connection_"[109]6750--that is, the more the natives can be prevented from combining, their labours, the greater, as Mr. Chapman thinks, will be the prosperity of India. Centralization has impoverished, and to a considerable extent depopulated, that country, but its work is not yet done. It remains yet to reduce the people of the Punjab, of Affghanistan and Burmah, to the condition of the Bengalese.