It has coal of an excellent character, and inexhaustible in quantity; it has fine petroleum, large supplies of timber and charcoal; it has iron, of a purity that would make an English iron-master’s mouth water, spread wholesale all over the country,--in most places to be had by light quarrying or collection from the surface; it has chrome iron capable of making the finest Damascus blades; manganiferous ore; splendid hematites in profusion. It has gold, silver, antimony, tin, copper, plumbago, lime, kaolin, gypsum, precious stones, asbestos. Soft wheat, equal to the finest Australian; hard wheat, equal to the finest kabanka.[100] It has food grains of every description: oilseeds, tobacco, tea, coffee, cocoa, sugar, spices, lac, dyes, cotton, jute, hemp, flax, coir, fibres of every description; in fact, products too numerous to mention. Its inhabitants are frugal, thrifty, industrious, capable of great physical exertion, docile, easily taught, skilful in any work requiring delicate manipulation. Labour is absurdly cheap; the soil for the most part wonderfully productive, and capable of producing crop after crop without any symptoms of exhaustion. The present yield of wheat is about 26,500,000 quarters, or about 9,500,000 quarters in excess of the total imports of wheat into England; and in the Punjab alone there is cultivable waste land sufficient to produce 12,000,000 quarters, besides enormous parts in Burmah and other parts of India, only requiring irrigation or population to bring them under the plough.[101] England imports annually commodities to the value of about £148,500,000 under six heads alone,[102] a large portion of which might be diverted to India by simply adopting a preferential tariff slightly favorable to her dependencies. Take, for example, wheat. If England be determined to persist in the endeavour to ruin its agricultural industry for a political whim, a slight tax on American and Russian wheat would suffice to turn the whole of the wheat import trade to India and Australia. Such a tax would, I believe, tend to lower, rather than raise, the price of wheat, because India would steadily go in for the production of wheat, if its calculations were not liable to be disturbed by a slight fall in the price of wheat in America or Russia, which may throw back a quantity of wheat on the hands of the Indian producers or dealers.[103]