It is a question whether jute and the export of rice have benefited any one except the merchants and middlemen. Owing to the fall in jute, the peasants were growing quantities of rice again when I was there; but next year the rice might go down and jute up, and so they live in a gambler’s uncertainty, and lay up no store of food, as the custom used to be, against the evil day. They sell everything as it grows, and with the money buy Rangoon rice which makes them sick. Many paternal officials, though bred on our university economics, told me that to save the people they would even prohibit jute, tax exported rice, and abolish the cotton excise. So far we may say the contest lies between Dundee and Eastern Bengal, but though I believe it to be a vital matter, that contest is tranquil and slow compared to the dramatic battle raging between Eastern Bengal and the British cities of Liverpool and Manchester. Liverpool stands for salt, Manchester for cotton, and Eastern Bengal has taken a solemn vow not to touch either their salt or their cotton till the burning wrong of Bengal is redressed. By the burning wrong they mean the Partition of the Bengali people into two separate and unconnected governments, Bengal proper to contain 18,000,000 of the race, and Eastern Bengal to contain 25,000,000. With the addition of the outlying and alien provinces of Behar, Chota Nagpur, and Orissa, Lord Curzon estimated the population of Bengal under the old capital of Calcutta at 54,000,000, of whom 9,000,000 would be Mohammedans; while, including the outlying and alien province of Assam, the population of “Eastern Bengal and Assam” with a new capital at Dacca would come to 31,000,000, of whom 18,000,000 would be Mohammedans. Throughout the whole of Bengal, whether East or West, it must be again remembered that the people are homogeneous, both Mohammedans and Hindus belonging to the Bengali race, speaking the same language, living in amity side by side for generations past, and only divided in religion because some of their number, chiefly of the lower and less educated castes, had long ago embraced Islam for the most persuasive of reasons.[36]