time in India, and if they wished to | adopt measures in order to prevent their recurrence as far as possible, they must be prepared for a considerable additional charge. Of late years a great amount of time and consideration had been devoted to Public Works in India, and reforms of various kinds had been suggested. He was by no means adverse to reforms; but, at the same time, he could not admit that the system was as bad as it had been painted. The establishment charges in connection with the Indian Public Works Department had certainly been heavy, and the general result of the system was, that out of every £1,000,000 expended, one-fourth was absorbed by the Staff expenses; but then it was most important that the Staff of the Department should be most efficient. A great injustice had been done to the old East India Company in connection with this question. It had during the period of its government to undertake many and costly enterprizes; but since the termination of its government the debt which it left unpaid had been quadrupled, notwithstanding the various modes of increasing the Revenue which had been resorted to at the instance of administrators like Mr. Wilson, the Earl of Mayo, and Lord Northbrook. The people of India were not so impatient of taxation as many supposed, but what they objected to was continual change of taxation. The way to improve India was by not cutting the Revenue too close to Expenditure in times of peace and prosperity, but to establish a good working margin, and bring it back in times of adversity. Whether it was wise to abolish the income tax he did not take upon himself to say; but he believed it had not been fairly tried, and he thought it ought not to have been abolished until a substitute had been found-one that would tax the rich and not the poor. The rich people of India were less taxed than any other people in the world, whilst the poor were heavily taxed, more especially with regard to salt. MR. J. K. CROSS: I wish to say a few words, because I entirely disagree with those who say that the import duties are equitable to the traders of this country. I can scarcely agree with the statement which the noble Lord the Under Secretary of State has put before the House on the question to-night. The Sir George Campbell policy of the Indian Government in regard to these duties is causing a good deal of uneasiness in Manchester and the neighbourhood, but certainly his assurances will do a great deal to relieve this feeling. The question I have to lay before the House as the view of Manchester men, I will state as shortly as possible, and in stating it, I shall have to go as far back as the year 1859, when the Indian Government was emerging from the troublous times of the Mutiny, and when, like other Governments in trouble, it found itself particularly short of funds. Well, it cast about to see on what it could levy such duties as would re-fill its empty coffers, and amongst other things it laid its hands on cotton goods and cotton yarn, which then, as now, were imported into India in very considerable quantities, and it levied a duty of 10 per cent on goods and 5 per cent on yarns, which duties were received with a good deal of protest by the manufacturing and commercial interests of this country, andit was pointed out very forcibly, by my hon. Friend who sits near me (Sir Thomas Bazley), that the imposition of these duties would induce the growth of a protected system of industry in India, which we have since witnessed. Through the exertions of the hon. Baronet, aided by, I think, Mr. Hadfield, who then represented Sheffield, these duties were reduced to 5 per cent on goods, and 33 per cent on yarns, but being ad valorem duties, the tariff values being fixed when prices were considerably higher than they now are, the duties have been and now are practically 6 per cent on goods and 4 per cent on yarns. It was generally thought by those who were connected with Indian finance that these duties would not be permanent, and I am quite free to confess that they were at first imposed for fiscal purposes only, and I do not think that the able financier, who has been alluded to by the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy (Sir George Campbell), Mr. James Wilson, who gave his sanction to them, would have had any idea that upon their imposition would be built up a system of protected industry such as we have seen grow up in India, since his time. But immediately on their imposition, it seemed to strike certain native capitalists that if their permanence could be secured, these duties might be turned to their advantage; and and manufacturer labours in competi- on the principle that our extremity was their opportunity, a principle as well understood by the Natives of India as by any other people in the world, they clubbed their money together, estab-quainted with the details of this queslished companies, and built mills for tion think it a most serious matter. spinning and weaving and set to I propose to give two instances, one of a work. Well, these mills at first spinning mill, and the other of a weaving were singularly unsuccessful, partly concern, because in Lancashire there are owing to the great fluctuations which many such separate businesses working occurred in the price of cotton during for the Indian trade. I hope hon. the American War; but the duties con- Members will excuse me for being sometinuing-and I wish hon. Members to what technical, but I wish to show the observe this-the duties continuing, they matter as it is. I will first take the case were induced to persevere with their ef- of a spinning mill containing 30,000 forts, and gradually a very large indus- spindles spinning coarse yarns. It will try has sprung up, as we think, under employ £40,000 of capital, engage the the fatherly care and protection of the services of 220 workpeople, to whom Indian Government. The hon. Member from £8,000 to £9,000 per annum will be opposite (Mr. Beckett-Denison) thought paid in wages, and its productions will fit to say, but I do not know with what be taxed to the extent of £4,000 per authority, that the main reason why In- annum before they can enter the Indian dian goods were preferred to Manchester market. But the case of the weaving goods was, that Manchester people wil- mill is much worse. A manufactory fully deteriorate their goods; but I running 1,000 looms, employing £40,000 would remind the hon. Member that of capital-the same amount as the spinLancashire supplies India with the best ning mill just mentioned-engaging the and finest goods which are used there. services of 600 or 700 people, to whom I am not here to defend Lancashire men £22,000 or £24,000 will be paid in who may disgrace their country by such wages, will have to pay a tax upon its practices as the hon. Member describes; productions, before they can enter the but I entirely disagree that this is the Indian market, amounting to £9,500 areason for the increase of this industry year. Now, if hon. Members will conin India. I find that the amount of ad- sider that, they will see the unfairness vantage the Indian manufacturer has of this treatment towards the manufacover the English manufacturer is about turing interests of the country. In the 6 per cent. There is no doubt the mea- one case, the disadvantage is 10 per cent sure of the advantage which these In- upon the capital employed, or half the dian mills enjoy in competition with wages paid. In the other, it amounts their Lancashire rivals is the exact to 24 per cent per annum on the capital amount of duty which they escape, but employed, or two-fifths of the wages. which the Lancashire mills have to pay Such are the disadvantages under which on their productions if they export them the English manufacturers labour in to India; and this advantage amounts comparison with this much-vaunted proat present to a sum equal to 6 per cent tected Indian industry-disadvantages per annum upon the capital employed in which are solely caused by the action of the Indian mill. Perhaps I shall put the Indian Government, and are entirely it more clearly by stating that £100,000 beyond, and quite independent of, any invested in cotton manufacture in India natural disadvantages under which we will turn over goods and yarns, worth labour, if any such there be. Now, this £125,000 per annum, on which, if the is a serious question, and it is agitating goods were English, £6,000 per annum the mercantile and manufacturing classes in duty would be levied; but as the In- very considerably; and various deputadian mill escapes the duty and gets the tions have waited upon the noble Lord market price for its productions, it has the Secretary of State (the Marquess of £6,000 a-year to the good, or 6 per cent Salisbury), who in this question holds on its capital; and this is practically the commercial destinies of many of our guaranteed by the Indian Government manufacturers, and some of our merby the duty. But what is the disadvan- chants, as it were in the hollow of his tage under which the English spinner hand. They have laid their case before VOL. CCXXVI. [THIRD SERIES.] 2 E him, and he has given them his answer. | who are already rich; it extracts a much He has told the gentlemen who waited larger sum from the people than it passes upon him that he thinks they greatly into the Exchequer; it is, undoubtedly, over-rate the effect of the duties in in- disadvantageous to this country; and it ducing competition. Now, no one knows is contrary to that Free Trade policy much more of the principles which re- which we advocate in every foreign gulate finance than the noble Lord; no country, and which is at the root of all one certainly in the other House knows commercial success. better than the noble Lord what is the amount of inducement required to coax capital to flow into new undertakings. The noble Lord has been Chairman of one of our great railway companies, and as such it has been his business to inform himself on these points; but does he seriously mean to say that he thinks the practical guarantee of a preference dividend of 6 per cent per annum by the Indian Government to the Bombay spinner is no inducement to capitalists to place their money in such undertakings? Because that is what it practically comes to, and had not the deputation which waited upon the noble Lord been mostly composed of "grave and reverend signiors" I should have suspected the noble Lord of mildly chaffing them, when he told them what was exactly tantamount to saying so. But the noble Lord went on still further, and said that we must expect competition, and that any interference by the Indian Government would be hardly fair. We do expect competition; a fair, free, and open competition we welcome, from whatever source it may come; but this is no fair, or free, or open competition. It is not competition we object to; it is the weight we have to carry in the race, which gets heavier and heavier to bear the longer we have to carry it. But the noble Lord said it would hardly be fair to the Indian Government to interfere. We think it grossly unfair, and we think that this interference should cease at the earliest possible time. At the end of one of the interviews, the noble Lord is reported to have said that if these duties were really protective they were indefensible. Now, I have tried to show that they are protective, and I hope that next year when I bring this question forward, the House will agree that, being protective, they are, as the noble Lord says, indefensible, and ought to be repealed. It appears to me, further, that this protective policy which we support in India is not to the advantage of that dependency, because it taxes the poorest of the people in order to put money into the pockets of those Mr. J. K. Cross SIR WILFRID LAWSON said, he must congratulate the noble Lord the Under Secretary for India and the hon. Member for Hackney (Mr. Fawcett) upon the good attendance of hon. Members, considering the advanced period of the Session and the heat of the weather. It was a better House than he expected, and than he saw five years ago when the attraction was much greater. The hon. Member for Wick, with his strong head, said this country was governing India with too strong a hand. He (Sir Wilfrid Lawson) was anxious that justice should be done to the people of India. With regard to the opium trade, the Government of this country raised a large revenue from it, and by a system that was one of the most outrageous and disgraceful that was ever perpetrated and forced upon a people. When they came to consider the 200,000,000 of people in India and the 400,000,000 in China, who were all God's subjects, it would surely be wiser not to impose this opium upon them, and to turn the Chinese into allies. As it was this policy of ours made us hated throughout China and in other parts of the East, and he was not sure that it had not a great deal to do with the complications that had taken place in our relations with Burmah. From what he heard, the merchants of this country were pushing this opium trade too much upon the people of India and China. If he asked for information on the subject he could not get it. If a war broke out, and he asked for information, they said-"Oh, oh! it is not for the interest of the service to give you information at this moment;" and when the war was over, if you asked for information they said"Oh, oh! the war is all over now, and the information would be of no use to you." He would now refer the attention of the Committee to the opinions of eminent medical men respecting the effects of opium on the human frame. The late Sir Benjamin Brodie, a distinguished physician, described its effects on the constitution as most injurious, an opinion which other medical men also entertained and expressed; and he (Sir Wilfrid Lawson) had that day heard from a gentleman who had been 30 years in China most distressing consequences resulting from our forcing the opium trade on the Chinese; and yet those who dealt in the article said, when remonstrated with-"Oh, the Chinese will have it." "We do not make wickedness-we only live by it," was the motto upon the rogue's escutcheon all over the world; but it was a disgraceful motto for this country to adopt. He (Sir Wilfrid Lawson) must say that it was a disgrace to England that her merchants should carry on such a trade. It was all very well for the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer to say that it brought in revenue, and that spirits brought in a large revenue; but with regard to the Chinese, he (Sir Wilfrid Lawson) was sure that if England went on in the way she had been going on by forcing the opium trade upon the people of that Empire, some very serious disaster would befall her in the East. He remembered a Resolution having been moved in this House on the subject of the opium trade with China, and that the then Prime Minister made a speech against the Resolution, and said no action could be taken in the question of the duty resulting from opium without inquiry. He would like that the noble Lord in his reply should give some hope that he would institute a careful inquiry, with a view to see whether the evils which had been condemned did not really exist. He feared the system would involve us in trouble, difficulty, and perhaps bloodshed, unless it was speedily put a stop to. When that time came, those responsible for Indian affairs would be to blame who had not carefully and calmly looked into the matter, and done something to stop a system which was not only degrading to our national honour, but most injurious to the best interests of this country. MR. FAWCETT said, he was afraid, from what they had heard from the present and from the late Under Secretary for India, that there was very little chance of the Indian Budget being brought on in the early part of the Session. Under those circumstances, a private Member would have to take the matter into his own hands, and, as the Session went on, raise separate discussions upon each of the topics which it concerned. In that case, every one who had paid any attention to Indian affairs would agree with him that there was no subject more worthy of careful consideration by Parliament than the functions discharged by the Indian Council. No one had a higher opinion of Members of the Council than he had, but the Council itself was the greatest disappointment in connection with the Government of India. Why the able men who were Members of the Council had not done more to protect the finances of India he could not understand. It had been conclusively shown by the hon. Members for Cambridge and Kirkcaldy that nothing but confusion arose by separating ordinary from extraordinary expenditure. The most serious danger connected with our Public Works policy was, that we did not understand what works would pay; and if we were to embark on a great public policy of that sort, one of the first things we ought to do was not to carry out those works simply by engineers of English training, but to bring to bear upon them the ability which existed amongst the Natives, among whom there had been some of the most accomplished engineers in the world. As to irrigation works, the noble Lord must have forgotten the statement of the Secretary of State at Manchester, who said there was scarcely an irrigation work which returned a fair interest upon outlay, except irrigation works based on native undertakings. The noble Lord further said that irrigation works were accompanied by serious disadvantages. Many of those works had been so unskilfully constructed that good land had been converted by them into morass, and it was now necessary to drain this land. Moreover, the Natives would often not use the water when brought to their doors, and it had been proposed to make them pay an irrigation tax whether they used it or not. At present, confuse the matter as we liked with regard to ordinary and extraordinary expenditure, we could not get over the fact that by the policy which was now being pursued we were adding to the Debt of India at the rate of £3,500,000 a-year; and these works, which might not prove remunerative, would pile up serious financial difficulty in a country where an additional tax even of £1,000,000 could not be imposed without causing great discontent. In con clusion, he must be allowed to express his determination that if the Government did not move for the re-appointment of the Select Committee next Session, he should certainly take upon himself the responsibility of doing so. LORD GEORGE HAMILTON said, he wished to say a few words in explanation and by way of reply. His hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Mr. Smollett) had referred to the question of irrigation works, and had given one or two instances in which such works had lamentably failed. If the Government were going to construct irrigation works on the same principle as those to which he had alluded, his argument would be valid; but it was in consequence of that failure that the Government were constructing irrigation works on a different system. The hon. Member for Hackney had said that his (Lord George Hamilton's) figures did not agree with certain statements which had been made by the Secretary of State for India. His (Lord George Hamilton's) figures were taken from a Return which had only just arrived from India, and which was, therefore, more accurate than any statement which had been previously made. He fully admitted that the expenditure with regard to Public Works in India must be carefully looked into. If the irrigation works did not pay, of course they ought to be stopped; but the Government had reason to believe that those works would pay. The hon. Member for the West Riding (Mr. Beckett-Denison) had asked by what means Staff officers who were drawing pay and doing no duty would be got rid of. Upon that subject what the Government had done was this MR. GRANT DUFF said, that he trusted the success of that night's experiment would not embolden Her Majesty's Government always to bring in the Indian Budget so near the 12th August. It had certainly been one of the best attended, and also one of the most interesting Indian discussions, to which he had listened on any occasion of the kind. The points on which he thought the Committee was most to be congratulated were the ex parte, but very clear and able statement of the Manchester case by the hon. Member for Bolton (Mr. J. K. Cross); that portion of the speech of the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy (Sir George Campbell), which dealt with the unjustly light taxation of the wealthier classes in India; and the excellent speech of the noble Lord the Under Secretary of State for India. The things in that speech which give him (Mr. Grant Duff) most satisfaction were the remarks about the import duties, the announcement as to the good terms on which the recent loan had been raised, and the hope that was held out of a speedy end to the Salt Line-one of the most disgraceful anomalies in administration which existed in any civilized country. With reference to a remark which fell from the hon.-they had allowed those officers to retire Member for Hackney (Mr. Fawcett) it was his (Mr. Grant Duff's) impression that the hon. Member altogether overrated the genius hitherto shown by the Natives of India for engineering. They had shown very great genius at many periods of their history for architecture, but by no means much genius for engineering. [Mr. FAWCETT: The Madras Irrigation Works.] His remarks applied to the Native genius for engineering that was, of course, the Native acting under Native, not under European superintendence. In conclusion, he would say that if the noble Lord had any figures which would confirm the impression which he (Mr. Grant Duff) received in India, that the Rajpootana system of State Railways was promising to pay extremely well, he (Mr. Grant Duff) would be glad if they could be produced on this or some other occasion. Mr. Fawcett on the pension to which they were entitled, and, in addition, to receive a sum in commutation for the Colonel's allowances, to which, after 38 years, they would be entitled. As to Cooper's Hill College, he admitted that its growth must be carefully watched. As the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy (Sir George Campbell) had pointed out, the unequal incidence of taxation in India was the one great blot upon the system. If the hon. Member could suggest any plan by means of which the rich and poor could be called upon to contribute in exact proportion to their fair liability, he would promise that it should be very carefully considered by the India Office and by the Government in India. To the hon. Member for Bolton (Mr. J. K. Cross), he would say that, without entering into a discussion upon the alterations of the tariff, he was quite certain that |