WANT OF LABOUR IN INDIA.

New Zealander, Volume XVIII, Issue 1720, 3 September 1862, Page 9

WANT OF LABOUR IN INDIA.

(From the “ Times,” June 14.) People who hold the common notions of India which obtain in England must have been a little startled by a sentence in our Calcutta correspondent’s letter which wo printed yesterday. lie tells us that “ the supply of cotton from Central India must long be limited, from the want of labour.” This is about the last want which popular estimation attributes to India. We can all believe in want of capital, want of industry, want of railways, want of irrigation, want of everything, except only the want of population. It has always been our habit to look upon India, with its hundred and fifty millions of human beings, as a region of the earth so densely peopled that human life was itself the great obstacle to human advancement, and the overcrowding of the species was the curse of the race. Any one who would take away a cargo of Coolies from the coast was supposed to bo a b mefactor to India. Even when we heard of some terrible pestilence or some frightful famine, although we rushed to relieve it to the fullest extent of our power, yet we suspect that there mingled with our commiseration an unconscious idea of a compensating good. We silently believed the survivors v would ultimately gain by the catastrophe, and wo were ’‘tacitly convinced that those who were perishing were but the excess of a population too great for the land to support. As we come to know India better, we abandon one by one nearly all the popular notions which were prevalent hero during the time of the Company ; and we discover every day with a new surprise that those things we had thought most indisputable are most certainly fallacious. Not only is India underpeopled, if we compare her present population with her possibilities of production, but oven in her present undeveloped state she has no hands to spare. What she might bo in the way of populousness, if her vast alluvial plains were all irrigated, if her jungles were cleared, if security were given to capital, and if water and railway communication gave free action to commerce, it would be scarcely profitable to speculate; India under those conditions would probably even surpass in density of population thosq drtmcN provippm on ity Intern o(Chhm

for lack of good government, humanity becomes congested and festers. It would be long, however, before India could ever reach a pass such as this. Our correspondent attributes the scantiness of population in Central India to the devastation of the Mahrattas, and that of Eastern Bengal to the incursions of the Burmese. The> populations must indeed be sparse over which such distant events could exert so durable an influence. The important matter, however, is that the fact really does exist. An unimportant insurrection in the Jyntea Hills in Eastern Bengal has required the presence of some of our military men to conciliate the chiefs, to redress the grievances of the reasonable, and to punish the obstinate. This necessity has drawn the attention of the Indian public at once to the beauty and to the desolation of a region so comparatively near to Calcutta, and yet so little known. There are in this province 43,000 square miles of valleys and glens resembling those of Scotland, but infinitely more fertile; and all this region is possessed by a population of some 2,000,000 souls. It can not only grow tea and corn, but it does, unfortunately for its inhabitants, grow too much opium. It produces the finest oranges and potatoes, and is, moreover, one mass of lime, coal, and iron. It is a treasure of vegetable and mineral wealth. Yet in this region there is upon an average only two human beings to every 43 square miles,—and we have allowed ourselves to believe that India is overpeopled I You cannot overpcoplc a region like India. All the theories that are applicable to an island like this are totally inapplicable to u country whose resources are not to an appreciable degree developed. But, even if we take those spots where the human weed is thought to grow most rank, you will find, so soon as you begin to make any demand upon the labour-market, that in average times there is not a man to spare. Even upon those coasts of India where the Hindoos were found in multitudes existing at starvation point, and where it was believed to be such great charity to take, them away to good food, and good wages in another sphere of labour, the real redundancy was found to be very small. A slight rise above the actual requirements of the labour-market had been sufficient to produce the distress which so excited our sympathy. Even districts that seemed inexhaustible from their population and their poverty soon ceased to supply emigrants. If the enterprise was pushed after the natural supply had ceased, and if the temptation to emigrate was made very strong, more hands were indeed obtained, but the district itself was left desolate. Similar experiments have been followed with the same result in every part of India. The call made by the railways upon the labour-market, which might have been considered inappreciable in a mass of 150,000,000, has not only more than doubled the price of labour in the districts traversed, but has also operated to nearly the same effect at great distances. Wherever European capital appears in India the price of labour at once rises, and the Indian workman is at this moment in the receipt of a wage which, whether reckoned by money or the necessaries it will buy, is greatly superior to any scale known to former generations. Still, no doubt, labour in India is very cheap when measured by the rates which rule in Europe and America. But, if the Indian is of such simple and inexpensive habits that he can live and labour for a comparatively small stipend, it must be remembered that he is also not a very profitable servant. A great many men are required in India to do a very moderate amount of work, and if we are to develope the riches either of Assam, or of any other district of that land, we cannot do it with only one human being to twenty square miles of country. Our Calcutta correspondent is right in drawing attention to that beautiful region of Assam, so rich with the alluvial spoil of the Himalayas. Perhaps ho dreams a wild dream when he talks of uniting the upper waters of the Burhampooter and of the Yang-tse-Kiang, and making by river and rail one great highway between Calcutta and Shanghai. But, without looking quite so far ahead as this, there is much which might be immediately done, if we had willing hands to perform it. So far from attempting to repress the human productiveness of our Indian Empire, it appears to us that our first policy should rather be, by raising the standard of comfort among the people, to stimulate the increase of population. The local congestions which, as distinguished from any general over-population, have been the occasion through all Indian history of great mortality, ought not to recur under our rule. When we have copious communication and free circulation there ought to be no more danger of famine. The public may be assured that our correspondent is right in his estimate that the evil in India is an insufficiency, and not a superabundance, of population. For the cultivation and the manufactures we wish to establish there, for our cotton-fields and for our tea plantations, we require more men and a better supplied labour-market; and if we would see the great future wo are all now predicting for our Indian Empire wo must cherish and cultivate the human being in India. _______