From Sea to Sea; Letters of TravelKipling, Rudyard
General
From Sea to Sea; Letters of Travel
Kipling, Rudyard
Asia -- Description and travel; Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936 -- Travel; United States -- Description and travel; Voyages and travels
in Guv'ment service go away without hundreds an' hundreds put by, and
never touched? You mark that. Money? The place stinks o' money--just
kept out o' sight. Do you ever know a native that didn't say _Garib
admi_ (I'm a poor man)? They've been sayin' _Garib admi_ so long that
the Guv'ment learns to believe 'em, and now they're all bein' treated as
though they was paupers. I'm a pauper, an' you're a pauper--_we_ 'aven't
got anything hid in the ground--an' so's every white man in this
forsaken country. But the Injian he's a rich man. How do I know? Because
I've tramped on foot, or warrant pretty well from one end of the place
to the other, an' I know what I'm talkin' about, and this 'ere Guv'ment
goes peckin' an' fiddlin' over its tuppenny-ha'penny little taxes as if
it was afraid. Which it is. You see how they do things in ----. It's six
sowars here, and ten sowars there, and--'Pay up, you brutes, or we'll
pull your ears over your head.' And when they've taken all they can get,
the headman, he says: 'This is a dashed poor yield. I'll come again.'
_Of course_ the people digs up something out of the ground, and they
pay. I know the way it's done, and that's the way to do it. You can't go
to an Injian an' say: 'Look here. Can you pay me five rupees?' He says:
'_Garib admi_,' of course, an' would say it if he was as rich as banker.
But if you send half a dozen swords at him and shift the thatch off of
his roof, he'll pay. Guv'ment can't do that. I don't suppose it could.
There is no reason why it shouldn't. But it might do something like it,
to show that it wasn't going to have no nonsense. Why, I'd undertake to
raise a hundred million--what am I talking of?--a hundred and fifty
million pounds from this country _per annum_, and it wouldn't be
strained _then_. One hundred and fifty millions you could raise as easy
as paint, if you just made these 'ere Injians understand that they had
to pay an' make no bones about it. It's enough to make a man sick to go
in over yonder to ---- and see what they do; and then come back an' see
what we do. Perfectly sickenin' it is. Borrer money? Why the country
could pay herself an' everything she wants, if she was only made to do
it. It's this blooomin' _Garib admi_ swindle that's been going on all
these years, that has made fools o' the Guv'ment."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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