It is very doubtful whether the immense increase of the jute crop has been of real benefit to the peasant. The price is variable. In 1906, for example, it went up to 14_s._ 8_d._ a maund (82 lbs.), and all the peasants laid down their land in jute, thus creating such a scarcity of rice that its price went up more than double—from an average of 5_s._ 4_d._ to 12_s._ a maund. In some districts rice rose to more than three times its normal price. Drought and flood combined to increase the scarcity, and a terrible famine ensued. Of course, it ought not to have been so. Economists would say that the sale of the jute and the export of the rice should bring in money with which the peasants could purchase food. The trouble was that reality refused to support the economic doctrine. Jute, like flax, is a very exhausting crop, yet I have seen it actually planted on the same field with rice, and at the same time, because it grows quicker, and can be harvested while the rice is green and short. Nothing but a deluge can restore the soil so treated, and, at the best, jute wants more room and more labour. Then there are the middlemen to be considered—the British and Jewish middlemen who swarm at the centres of the jute trade, where the heavy wooden junks lie thick as a town upon the rivers. Lastly, there is the zemindar or landowner. He comes under the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, and his rent or tax to Government is fixed for ever. But within limits he can raise the rent on the cultivator, and it is in the nature of landlords to raise the rent. They are not rich themselves, these zemindars. Throughout Bengal I heard lamentable stories of their genteel but increasing poverty that reminded me of the distressed Irish landlords of twenty years ago. Like the French, they have the custom of dividing the land equally among the children, and the Mohammedans endow their daughters in the division, which is very nice of them, but only hastens the family ruin. Unless a zemindar family launches out into other forms of labour beyond eating its rents, the number of hangers-on to small parcels of land increases, and their condition is often pitiable. All the more because, though the Settlement is permanent, the cesses or rates nominally levied for roads and District Boards, but really applied to all manner of other purposes, are continually increasing, and the curse of malaria, which saps the vitality and rots the brain, appears to be falling with peculiar virulence upon the zemindar class.