Southern India had been devastated by wars, famines, and bands of plunderers; the cultivating classes were ground down by oppressive taxation, by the illegal exactions of the officers of Government, of the renters employed to collect the Government dues, and of the sowkars without whose assistance the ryots could not subsist and carry on their calling, and who kept them in a state little removed from perpetual bondage; trade was hampered by insecurity of property, defective communications, and onerous transit duties; the vast majority of the population suffered extreme hardships when there was even a partial failure of crops in small tracts, owing to the great difficulty and cost of obtaining supplies of grain from more favoured regions; the peasantry and even possessors of considerable landed property, when not holding office under Government themselves, were cowering before the pettiest Government officer and submitting to tortures and degrading personal ill-treatment inflicted on the slightest pretext; persons who had chanced to acquire wealth, if they belonged to the lower classes, dared not openly use it for purposes of enjoyment or display for fear of being plundered by the classes above them; the agricultural classes as a whole had few wants beyond those imposed by the necessity for bare subsistence, no ambition or enterprise to try untrodden ways, and no example to stimulate them to endeavour to better their condition, while the rigid usages of castes and communities in which society was organized repressed all freedom of action and restricted the scope for individual initiative. To understand the full significance of the change which has come over the country one has to contrast what he sees at present, unsatisfactory as it may appear from some points of view, with the state of things described above.... Remembering that methods of progress calculated to evoke national feeling and religious enthusiasm are unavailable under the conditions of the case, the progress that has been made ... is little short of marvellous.