FAMINES IN INDIA

WITHOUT subscribing to every single proposition laid down by him, it is safe to assert that it was a powerful speech which Lala Lajpat Rai made at the mammoth gathering of Lahore citizens held on Sunday last. The theme of the lecture was the relation between the repeated famines in India and the chronic poverty of which they are the outcome, and the system of government in the country. This is not the first time that such a relation has been sought to be established; nor is Lala Lajpat Rai the first man who has sought to establish it. Here as elsewhere, to quote Lala Lajpat Rai in another connection, it was “the Moderate leaders who showed us the way.” Dadabhai Naoroji and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Ramesh Chandra Dutt and Surendranath Banerjea, not to mention a host of others, all had sought to connect the prevalence of famine in India with some aspect or other of the form and system of government in the country. Who that is old enough to remember can have forgotten the eloquent speech at a Calcutta Congress in which Sir, then Mr., Surendranath Banerjea prefaced a powerful indictment of this form and system with the words “the history of British rule in India is a history of famines?” Who can have forgotten the never-ceasing plea of Dadabhai for the reduction of the Home charges, of Dutt for a radical modification of the land revenue system, of the illustrious Gokhale for fiscal autonomy and the pursuit of a radically different economic policy, and of all of them together for a reduction in military expenditure? Some of the evils on which these moderate politicians dwelt with such passionate emphasis have grown since their time, especially the last. The expenditure which Dutt and Gokhale described as appalling has risen to treble the figure; and not only the expenditure, but even the proportion it bore to the revenues of the country and to the earning of the average citizen has greatly increased.