But let us put things at their best. Let us suppose there is neither drought, nor famine, nor plague. Let us assume that the assessment has been paid without borrowing, and the Forest Laws observed or evaded, that wild beasts have been killed, and yet the deer have not damaged the crops. Let us suppose that the ryot’s income reaches the highest possible average, which Lord Curzon calculated at £2 a year per head of the population, including all the rich merchants, bankers, and landowners. It is next to impossible that the average income in any village could be as much as that, but let us assume it is. Still it remains at only half what is spent per head in England every year on drink alone. It represents a standard of poverty which we can hardly conceive—a level where every fraction of a farthing counts. And yet I found within twenty miles of Poona a group of villages where the ryots clubbed together of their own accord to hire a schoolmaster at a salary of eight shillings a month. In face of a sacrifice so astonishing it appeared to me that all the outcries about the dangers of education in India that were then filling the speeches of our statesmen and the columns of the _Times_ and Anglo-Indian papers, might with good hope be accounted vain. [Illustration: A TEMPLE TANK, MADRAS. [_Face p. 102._ ] FOOTNOTES: [19] The total military expenditure for India, including Marine, Military Works, etc., was £21,586,086 for 1906-7, but this was reduced in the following year to £20,520,500. See “Government of India, Financial Statement, 1908-9,” p. 16. [20] Of the many books on the Indian Land Revenue, one may consult Mr. Romesh Dutt’s “India in the Victorian Age,” “Famines and Land Assessment,” and “The Economic History of British India”; “Land Revenue Policy,” an official reply to Mr. Dutt’s criticisms, issued by Lord Curzon in 1902; some chapters in Sir Henry Cotton’s “New India”; some pamphlets by Sir William Wedderburn, “The Indian Ryot,” “The Skeleton at the Jubilee Feast,” etc.; “Indian Problems,” by Mr. S. M. Mitra (strongly on the official side); and Mr. Sidney Low’s “Vision of India,” containing in chapter xxiii. an interesting account of the Settlement Officer’s work in camp. Mr. Theodore Morison’s “Industrial Organization of an Indian Province” (1906), is also mainly occupied with the land question in the United Provinces of Agra and Oude. [21] “Land Revenue Policy” (1902), p. 13. [22] Quoted by Mr. Vaughan Nash in his chapter on the Land Revenue System: “The Great Famine and its Causes” (1900). [23] “India in the Victorian Age,” by R. C. Dutt, p. 491 (2nd edition). [24] “The Great Famine,” pp. 240-2. [25] Letter from “A Poona Resident” to the _Glasgow Herald_, December 14, 1907. [26] “The Great Famine,” p. 62 ff. [27] See “The Skeleton at the Jubilee Feast,” by Sir William Wedderburn (1897), p. 9.