The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & MissionarySmith, George
Religion
The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary
Smith, George
Carey, William, 1761-1834; Missions -- India
religion, few things would be more likely to cement and preserve the
connection between both countries than the existence of such a class of
British-born landholders in India."
It is profitable to read this in the light of subsequent events--of the
Duff-Bentinck reforms, the Sepoy mutiny, the government of the
Queen-Empress, the existence of more than three millions of Christians
in India, the social and commercial development due to the
non-officials from Great Britain and America, and the administrative
progress under Lord Curzon and Lord Minto.
There is one evil which Carey never ceased to point out, but which the
very perfection of our judicial procedure and the temporary character
of our land assessments have intensified--"the borrowing system of the
natives." While 12 per cent. is the so-called legal rate of interest;
it is never below 36, and frequently rises to 72 per cent. Native
marriage customs, the commercial custom of "advances," agricultural
usage, and our civil procedure combine to sink millions of the
peasantry lower than they were, in this respect, in Carey's time. For
this, too, he had a remedy so far as it was in his power to mitigate an
evil which only practical Christianity will cure. He was the first to
apply in India that system of savings banks which the Government has of
late sought to encourage.
At a time when the English and even Scottish universities denied their
honorary degrees to all British subjects who were not of the
established churches, Brown University, in the United
States--Judson's--spontaneously sent Carey the diploma of Doctor of
Divinity. That was in the year 1807. In 1823 he was elected a
corresponding member of the Horticultural Society of London, a member
of the Geological Society, and a Fellow of the Linnæan Society. To him
the latter year was ever memorable, not for such honours which he had
not sought, but for a flood of the Damoodar river, which, overflowing
its embankments and desolating the whole country between it and the
Hoogli, submerged his garden and the mission grounds with three feet of
water, swept away the botanic treasures or buried them under sand, and
destroyed his own house. Carey was lying in bed at the time, under an
apparently fatal fever following dislocation of the hip-joint. He had
lost his footing when stepping from his boat. Surgical science was
then less equal to such a case than it is now, and for nine days he
suffered agony, which on the tenth resulted in fever. When hurriedly
carried out of his tottering house, which in a few hours was scoured
away by the rush of the torrent into a hole fifty feet deep, his first
thought was of his garden. For six months he used crutches, but long
before he could put foot to the ground he was carefully borne all over
the scene of desolation. His noble collection of exotic plants,
unmatched in Asia save in the Company's garden, was gone. His
scientific arrangement of orders and families was obliterated. It
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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