Church. We think, however, that those will be best supplied if they are not exclusively considered. Nothing would lead more surely to feebleness and inefficiency, nothing would more certainly loosen the already relaxing hold which the Church has upon the educated laity, than that young men intending to take orders should be set apart by themselves to be nurtured in a cloistered virtue. On the other hand, nothing would more strengthen the Church than the power of recruiting her numbers from all ranks of society; nothing would give the clergy greater influence than the experience of having known varieties of men in the early days of life. The University should be the place where men of every shade of opinion, and of all grades in the social scale, meet on the common ground of education. It should be in reality, what it is often loosely said to be, an avenue into life-a path whereby talent may get forward in the world to do it service. At present there is no way upwards save by moneygetting. In these respects the University might be to the nineteenth century what the Priesthood was to the middle ages. To strengthen the capacities of the Church for good, to raise the tone of other professions, and thus to leaven the whole of society, these are no ignoble aims for even Oxford to set before herself. And this is not all. The University might render a vast political service by bringing out the talent of the nation. more than is now possible. In no country, perhaps, is the area from which men rise into public life so small as in our own. Compare France, for example, with England in this particular. Among us, without wealth, no man has any hope of public life. The dislike of adventurers,' as they are called, so general in Parliament, if probed to its real foundation, will be found to rest on a mere vulgar admiration of money, with perhaps a prejudice against Irishmen superadded. In no other country does such a dislike prevail; and the consequence is, that in no country are politics so seldom studied as a profession as in ours. are apt to think this an advantage; it is on the contrary a great evil. It simply restricts the supply. Out of a hundred men of the upper classes you will certainly have a larger percentage of competent statesmen than out of a hundred of any other class, just as you will have a larger percentage of competent lawyers or competent doctors-in short, of able men. But if we could extend the field of our choice over 100,000 of the middle and lower classes, should we find no available ability there wasted? And from the fact that we cannot so extend our choice, is nothing lost to the country? Worst of all is, that the area is narrowing every day. The times of patronage and small boroughs have passed away, and with them has gone many a chance to poor ability of an entrance into public life. Politics are now as literature was in the days of Dr. Johnson,-patrons are gone by, and publishers are not yet. The Universities might be the publishers of political life. These may seem fond fancies. And yet it is hard that we should be denied what chance there may be of realizing them. That chance, we feel assured, will only be given us by Parliament. That Parliament will give it we fully believe; for on academical reform the House of Commons is prepared to act with liberality and vigour. The one decided Liberal victory of last session was won on this field. And we cannot but think with pleasure that in such a contest there will be no disunion among ourselves that the single light of the Cave will forsake its darkness, and resume his fitting place among the foremost friends of liberty and progress. On academical questions at least, Mr. Lowe has never shown any signs of wavering. Two things, at all events, seem clear: one, that Parliament should be applied to; the other, that the application, by whomsoever urged, is almost certain to be successful. VOL. XLVI.—NO. XCI ART. VIII-1. Three Unpublished Tours through the FamineStricken Districts in 1866. 2. An Epitome of the Famine in Cuttack. By GOPAL CHUNDER HALDAR. 8vo. Cuttack, 1866. 3. Market Rates and Official Papers published by the Board of Revenue, Lower Provinces. 1865, 1866. 4. The Englishman. A Calcutta Daily Paper. 1865, 1866. A Bengali Paper. 1865, 1866. 7. Selection of Papers from the Records in the East India House. Folio. 1820. LOWER BENGAL has three harvests-a rice crop which is cut in September, another rice crop which ripens in December, and a pulse crop which is ready in spring. The first of these grows only in damp localities; the third is a mere by-product of the year, yielding small returns; on the second the population chiefly depends for food. The rains of 1865, instead of continuing till October, ceased abruptly in August; and threefourths of the December harvest withered in the blade. Small farmers sent out their cattle to graze down, in a morning, the crops which were to have maintained their families during the ensuing twelve months; the village money-lenders put in motion the machinery of the law in fruitless efforts to recover their advances; landowners found it necessary to remit half their rents, and all felt that 1866 would be an anxious year for Lower Bengal. But while every one foresaw high prices, none anticipated general starvation; and the press hoped that, by timely measures, the evil might be kept below the point at which scarcity passes into famine. The swampy river-districts had reaped a plentiful crop in September, and the improved means of communication with which British rule has intersected Bengal, promised to relieve the necessities of the west by the superfluities of the east. There was food enough in the country, many thought, if it could only be fairly distributed. The laws of supply and demand would hold true in India, as in England. Grain would find its way from places where it was plentiful and cheap to places where it was scarce and dear, and the action of Government, so urged the public organs, ought to be confined to publishing weekly returns of the market rates in the various districts. Government accepted this advice. Every grain-merchant, by running his eye down the price-lists, learned where to buy rice at a low rate, and where to sell it at a high one. Instead of the corn-dealers taking fright and shutting up their shops, as at the commencement of previous famines, they carried on their operations more briskly than usual. The speculation proved a safe one. The returns were rapid. Capitalists of all degrees-land-holders, money-lenders, producemerchants, and village traders-embarked in the traffic, and a tide of importation set in from the east to the west, such as had never before been known in Bengal. The chief seat of the trade was at Kooshtea, the terminus of the Eastern Bengal Railway, and the spot where it taps the network of rivers formed by the mouths of the Ganges and Brahmaputra. Four or five large steamers laden with grain came in every week. Each morning a fleet of rice-ships hove round the point, cumbrous high-sterned galleys lined the river bank five deep, till at length the railway company had to have recourse to the Courts to stop native craft discharging on its lines and sidings. While food thus poured in from the east, a counter current of population had steadily set from the opposite direction. No sooner did a steamer deposit its rice-bags on the wharf than it took on board a cargo of labourers who had come from the parched and overcrowded west to seek their fortunes in the sparsely peopled tea-districts on the north-eastern frontier. During the summer months these migrations had gone on at an unprecedented rate. Tea-planters offered high wages to all comers, and 3820 adults had passed through Kooshtea eastwards in a single month. At the same time, emigration to the Mauritius and the West Indian Islands proceeded briskly from Calcutta, and there seemed good reason to hope that, what with food coming into, and people going away from, the districts which had suffered most, the new year would be one of local scarcities rather than of famine. Measures, complete and effectual beyond precedent, had been adopted to meet the coming trial. Public notice of it had been given; Government had stimulated without interfering with the laws of supply and demand; rivers, roads and canals, not one of which had been projected in previous seasons of distress, were now at work day and night distributing the national stock of food, and nothing remained but to wait, with mingled hopes. and misgivings, till the slow months should show whether the September harvest of the eastern districts would suffice for the whole of Lower Bengal. The solution which this problem has received is such as no one who witnessed it can ever forget. Humane men will shrink from remembering the scenes of 1866, as they would from dwelling upon the opening pages of Boccaccio. It is right, however, that the measures by means of which the famine has been dealt with should be recorded, not only as precedents in case of a similar calamity, but also as a part of that solemn account which England has to render of her stewardship in India to the civilized world. The retail price of rice in Lower Bengal seldom exceeds, in ordinary years, a halfpenny a pound. In a few thicklypeopled localities it is sometimes higher, but in secluded agricultural districts it is generally lower, and this sum may be fixed upon as a fair average for the whole. An unskilled adult labourer earns threepence a day if he finds work on the railways or under an English employer, and about twopencehalfpenny if under a native master. Hired labourers, however, form only a small proportion of the population. The classes who in this country would work for daily wages are in Bengal cottier farmers, holding from three to five acres, and enjoying an income very little better, but still a little better, than the hired labourers. Those who have minutely studied the rural economy of India, estimate their crops as equivalent to a sum of ten shillings a month, or fourpence a day. Taking the hired workman and the cottier farmers together, the average wage of the labouring population of Bengal amounts to about threepence-farthing a day. This sum, although contemptible in the eyes of a Northumberland or even of a Wiltshire peasant, represents in ordinary times a fair amount of animal comfort in Lower Bengal. Twopence-halfpenny procures five pounds of solid rice, a quantity which amply suffices for the wants of the temperate Bengali and his family. Besides rice, hardly anything requires to be bought. Beef he never touches, and mutton or kid only once or twice a year, at family sacrifices. As a member of a village, he has generally some ancient, although disputed, right of fishing in the communal pond from which he irrigates his fields. His children pick the vegetables of common use in every damp hollow. His thatched roof furnishes an unfailing supply of pumpkins, and beyond these what does he want? A little oil to polish his skin, a little salt and pepper to season his rice, and a single coarse cotton cloth to wrap round his waist. His dwelling, if he be a cottier farmer, goes along with his land; if he be a hired labourer the rent seldom exceeds a shilling a year, and that sum he is seldom able to pay. Household furniture costs him nothing. As the national mode of sitting is to squat on the heels, he is ignorant of the use of a chair, and to many wealthy and wellborn Bengalis, a table is still a dangerous innovation, which means more than appears on the surface. He sleeps on the ground, or on a reed mat. The cloth that serves him by day |