Allied to this, and even more general in its pressure on the poor, stands, secondly, the Salt tax. Its oppressive character has been much disputed; but in the Madras Deccan and the poorer districts of Bombay there should be no doubt whatever upon the matter. It is the one great theme of complaint, the one that touches the people most nearly and is most injurious in proportion to the poverty of the sufferer by it. The comparatively well-to-do ryot of Bengal and North-Western India does not feel it and does not complain of it. But wherever there is real pinching in the necessities of life, there the salt monopoly raises a clamorous cry. It is only the very poor who are obliged to stint themselves in salt; but the very poor are, unfortunately, the rule in Southern India. In the Deccan, moreover, its pressure is more galling, because natural salt lies on the ground, and the people are therefore starved of it as it were in sight of plenty. In several villages which I passed the ryots told me that they had been reduced to driving their cattle by night to the places where salt is found, that they may lick it by stealth; but the guards impound them if thus caught infringing the law; and latterly orders have been given that the police should collect in heaps and destroy all salt whatever found in its natural state above ground. In other parts I heard of a kind of leprosy attacking persons deprived of this necessary article of diet; and especially on the sea-coast south of Bombay the disease was spoken of as prevalent. The fact of there being no complaint with regard to the salt tax at Calcutta or in Northern India, has caused the Indian Government to be callous in this matter, and I fear the fact that it brings six millions sterling to the revenue is an additional reason why it is likely still to be overlooked. But it is one that is nevertheless very urgent in the poorer districts, where it is causing real and increasing suffering, and where it is regarded with well-founded anger. The price of salt sold to the people by the Government is reckoned at from 1200 to 2000 per cent. on its cost value.
Lastly, and this is the case all over British India, the peasantry is deeply, hopelessly in debt. It is curious to find this prime cause of the Egyptian Revolution faithfully reproduced in India under our own paternal and enlightened rule, and through the same causes. Agricultural debt came into being in either case with European methods of finance; and, although the subject has been thoroughly threshed out by previous writers, I shall perhaps be pardoned if I once more briefly explain the process. In old times, as I understand the case, in Oriental lands money was practically unknown to the peasantry. Their dealings were in kind, and especially the land tax paid to the Government was paid not in coin but in corn. The whole of the peasants’ security, therefore, if they wanted to borrow, was their crop--and, if at sowing-time they needed seed, it was recoverable only at the harvest; at which time also the Government took its share--a tenth according to strict Mohammedan law, or it might be a fifth, or in times of grievous tyranny the half. Nothing more, however, than the crop of the year was forthcoming. No lender, therefore, would advance the impecunious cultivator more than his seed corn or the loan of a yoke of oxen, and there was no possibility on the Government’s part of anticipating the taxes. The economic law of ancient Asia was to do things parsimoniously, to spend according to the means in hand, and at most to store up wealth for rainy, or rather rainless, days.