"Rice was going every hour out of the country. 230,371 bags of 164 pounds each--making 37,780,844 lbs.--were exported from Calcutta. Where? To the Mauritius, to feed the kidnapped Coolies. Yes: to feed the men who had been stolen from the banks of the Ganges and the hills adjacent, and dragged from their native shore, under pretence of going to one of the Company's villages, to grow in the island of Mauritius what they might have grown in abundance upon their own fertile, but over-taxed land. The total amount of rice exported from Calcutta, during the famine in 1838, was 151,923,696 lbs., besides 13,722,408 lbs. of other edible grains, which would have fed and kept alive all those who perished that year. Wives might have been saved to their husbands, babes to their mothers, friends to their friends; villages might still have been peopled; a sterile land might have been restored to verdure. Freshness and joy and the voices of gladness, might have been there. Now, all is stillness, and desolation, and death. Yet we are told we have nothing to do with India."[115] The nation that exports raw produce _must_ exhaust its land, and then it _must_ export its men, who fly from famine, leaving the women and children to perish behind them. By aid of continued Coolie immigration the export of sugar from the Mauritius has been doubled in the last sixteen years, having risen from 70 to 140 millions of pounds. Sugar is therefore very cheap, and the foreign competition is thereby driven from the British market. "Such conquests," however, says, very truly, the London _Spectator_-- "Don't always bring profit to the conqueror; nor does production itself prove prosperity. Competition for the possession of a field may be carried so far as to reduce prices below prime cost; and it is clear from the notorious facts of the West Indies--from the change of property, from the total unproductiveness of much property still--that the West India production of sugar has been carried on, not only without replacing capital, but with a constant sinking of capital." The "free" Coolie and the "free negro" of Jamaica, have been urged to competition for the sale of sugar, and they seem likely to perish together; but compensation for this is found in the fact that-- "Free-trade has, in reducing the prices of commodities for home consumption, enabled the labourer to devote a greater share of his income toward purchasing clothing and luxuries, and has increased the home trade to an enormous extent."[116] What effect this reduction of "the prices of commodities for home consumption" has had upon the poor Coolie, may be judged from the following passage:--