George's Chapel at Venice; and the Dalesmen must take care of themselves for the present. Respecting my own money matters, I have only to report that things are proceeding, and likely to proceed to the end of this year, as I intended, and anticipated: that is to say, I am spending at my usual rate, (with an extravagance or two beyond it,) and earning nothing. III. The following notes on the existing distress in India, by correspondents of the Monetary Gazette,' are of profound import. Their slightly predicatory character must be pardoned, as long as our Bishops have no time to attend to these trifling affairs of the profane world. "Afflictions spring not out of the ground, nor is this dire famine an accident that might not have been averted. David in the numbering of Israel sinned in the pride and haughtiness of his heart, and the retribution of Heaven was a pestilence that from Dan to Beersheba slew in one day seventy thousand men. The case of India is exactly parallel. This rich country has been devastated by bad government, and the sins of the rulers are now visited on the heads of the unoffending and helpless people. These poor sheep, what have they done? It cannot be denied that, taking the good years and the bad together, India is capable of supplying much more corn than she can possibly consume; and besides, she can have abundant stores left for exportation. But the agricultural resources of the land are paralyzed by a vile system of finance, the crops remain insufficient, the teeming population is never properly fed, but is sustained, even in the best of times, at the lowest point of vitality. So that, when drought comes, the food supplies fall short at once, and the wretched hungry people are weak and prostrate in four-and-twenty hours. The ancient rulers of India by their wise forethought did much, by the storage of water and by irrigation, to avoid these frightful famines; and the ruins of their reservoirs and canals, which exist to this day, testify alike to their wisdom, and to the supreme folly of India's modern rulers. Diverse principles of statesmanship underlie these different policies, and the germ of the whole case is hidden in these first principles. The ancients reserved from the 'fat' years some part of their produce against the inevitable 'lean' years which they knew would overtake them. When, therefore, the 'lean' years came, their granaries were comparatively full. You, with your boasted wisdom of the nineteenth century, in reality degenerate into the madness of blind improvidence. You do even worse. You draw on the future, by loans and kindred devices, in order to repair the errors and shortcomings of the present. The past was once the present, and you drew on what was then the future; that future is now the present, the bill is at maturity, there are no resources either in the storehouse or in the till, and famine comes of consequence. Nor is this all-the greater part of the folly and crime remains to be told. You have desolated the fairest portion of the land by the iniquities of usury. The cultivating classes are in hopeless indebtedness, the hereditary money-lender holds them firmly in his grasp, and the impoverished villagers have neither the means nor the heart properly to cultivate the soil. The rulers sit quietly by, while the normal state of things is that agriculture -the primitive industry of the land-is carried on under the vilest system of 'high finance'; where loans are regularly contracted even for the purchase of cattle, and of implements of husbandry, and the rates of usury run from thirty to eighty per cent. Agriculture is thus stunted and paralyzed by usury, and not by droughts; and as links in a natural chain of sequences, the earth refuses her increase, and the people perish. The blight and curse of India is usury. You and all your subordinates know it is so, and you do not, and dare not, interpose with dignity or effect. Your fathers planted that tree, so fair to behold, and so seemingly desirable to make the partakers thereof rich; but it is forbidden, Every great states and in the laws of as was the tree in the early Paradise of man. man who has written his fame in the history the world, has denounced and forbidden it. Are you wiser than they? Was Lycurgus a fool when he forbade it? Was Solon a fanatic when he poured his bitterest denunciations on it? Were Cato, Plato, and Aristotle mad when with burning words they taught its iniquities? Were the Councils of the Church of Rome drunk with insane prejudices, when one after another they condemned it as a mortal sin? Was the Protestant Church of England in deadly error, or in petty warfare against the science of political economy, against truth or against morality, when she declared it to be the revenue of Satan? Was Mahomet wrong when he strictly forbade it? or the Jewish Church when it poured its loudest anathemas on it as a crime of the first magnitude? They all with one accord, in all ages, under the influences of every form of civilization and religion, denounced and forbade it even in the smallest degree; and it has destroyed every nation where it has been established. In India it is not one per cent. which is inherently wrong, and insidiously destructive. It is eighty per cent., with the present penalty of a deadly famine, and a sharp and complete destruction imminent. "But this wisdom of Joseph in Egypt was not so rare in ancient times. The rulers of these epochs had not been indoctrinated with Adam Smith and the other political economists, whose fundamental maxim is, 'Every man for himself, and the devil for the rest.' Here is another illustration, and as it belongs to Indian history, it is peculiarly pertinent here. The Sultan, Ala-ud-din, fixed the price of grain, and received it as tribute; by these means so much royal grain came in Delhi, that there never was a time when there were not two or three royal granaries full of grain in the city. When there was a deficiency of rain, the royal stores were opened; corn was never deficient in the market, and never rose above the fixed price. If the rains had fallen regularly, and the seasons had always been favourable, there would have been nothing so wonderful in grain remaining at one price; but the extraordinary fact was, that though during the reign of Ala-ud-din there were years in which the rain was deficient, yet, instead of the usual scarcity, there was no want of corn in Delhi, and there was no rise in the price, either of the grain brought out of the royal granaries or of that imported by the dealers. Once or twice when the rains failed to some extent, a market overseer reported that the price had risen half a jital, and he received twenty blows with a stick. That was an admirable administration for Perhaps if the people; our own is supreme folly in comparison. every time there were an Indian famine we were to administer twenty blows with a stick to a finance minister and a political economist, and were to hang up in every village the principal usurer, the nations might, by aid of these crude methods, arrive at a perception of the wisdom of ancient rule. We certainly would do much to prevent the recurrence of Indian famines after the establishment of that stern but salutary discipline. "Talking of usury in India, the 'Globe' has just published for public edification another illustration of this rampant iniquity. 'In a case which lately came before the Calcutta Small Cause Court, it was proved that during two years the debtor had paid 1,450 rupees for the interest and amortization of an original debt of 600 rupees. Yet the creditor had so arranged the account that he was able to make a final claim of 450 rupees on account of principal, and 26 rupees as overdue interest. Thus, in the course of only two years, the loan of 600 rupees had swallowed up 1,926 rupees, or at the rate of 963 rupees per annum. After deducting the amount of the original advance, the interest charges came to 681 rupees 8 annas a year, so that the creditor really recovered the debt, with 13 per cent. interest, in the course of twelve months, and yet held as large a claim as ever against his victim. Owing to the non-existence of usury laws in India, the judge was |