What can a people do for themselves when the average wage is not more than three rupees or three shillings a month? What can all the learned investigations and scientific reports of Government do for a people in such an utterly helpless condition? I am not speaking at random. I have seen and heard for myself, and know what I am talking about. To illustrate: Passing through a field where a man—almost naked—was rooting up the earth with a pair of small skeleton cattle, I had a chat with him about his life and crops. I asked him how much he got a year from all his labor. He replied, that if by working every day he could get a little food for himself and family, and at the close of the year could have enough to buy a cloth for himself, he would be happy. A whole year’s work for a little food, a little rice with weeds and stuff from his fields, not wheat or grain, as all the latter would have to be sold to pay the rent, and at the end have enough left to buy a cloth, worth less than a shilling! The great curse of Indian agriculture, is the middlemen, the “zemindars,” or village owners. They do nothing except to pass their time in idleness and dissipation, spending more in one night on a nautch dance of prostitutes, than would dig a dozen wells, or build a good tank, while they live on the sweat and blood of their ryots. It is to the infamy of Government that it tolerates such a system of tyranny, injustice and robbery. Not one in ten thousand of these zemindars does anything for the benefit of his villagers. I once talked with a great Maharajah with a long string of titles, who was ever head first when his name could be mentioned in public, and who privately was known as a screw, the owner of hundreds of villages, and I suggested some improvements for his people. “No,” he replied, “I have nothing to do with them, except to get my rents, all I want is my rupees,” and he was getting them by lacs a year. They are worse than vultures, for these are scavengers, destroyers of carrion, good birds, and never take life, but such men as this Maharajah, live and grow fat on the lives of their serfs. It is evident that I grow warm, yes hot, on this subject, and why not? Another thing I cannot abide, and that is the learned nonsense about improving the condition of the agricultural population by some high flown scientific processes. You might as well form a society to cultivate the valleys of the moon, or “go about to turn the sun to ice by fanning in his face with a peacock’s feather.” Lighten the burdens of poverty, and the crushing of the ryots, by less taxation, by the destruction of the leeches, the zemindars, and then the people would have something on which to live and help themselves. The permanent prosperity of a country depends on agriculture, and India will never come up, it is now at its lowest depth, until the condition of the ryots is radically changed.