IT has been thought advisable not to interrupt the account of events in Afghanistan by any other matter dealt with during Lord Lytton's administration. The questions of internal administration are therefore reserved for this and the following chapters, which relate to Finance, to the question of the inclusion of Natives in the Indian Civil Service, and to the passing of an Act for repressing seditious writings published in the vernacular. 6 The measures carried out by Lord Lytton's Government for the improvement of the Finances and the financial system of India have had a great and lasting influence on the prosperity of the country. In this department Lord Lytton had the good fortune of seeing what he foresaw,' of carrying out during his tenure of office all, or almost all, the reforms at which he aimed from the beginning of his Viceroyalty. In a letter to Lord Salisbury of September 24, 1876, he thus summed up the four chief heads of his financial policy: Letter to 1. Equalisation of salt duties throughout India Lord Saliswith a view to their early reduction, and abolition bury, Sept. of the sugar duty. 24, 1876 Financial 2. Extension of the system of provincial assign- Programme ments, and its application to sources of income. 6 3. Immediate and final abandonment of the Letter to Lord Salisbury, Sept. 24, 1876 Financial present system of constructing extraordinary public works out of capital annually borrowed in England, and transfer from Imperial to provincial resources of the responsibility of carrying out works of acknowledged local utility. 6 4. Abolition of the import duty on coarse cottons, with a distinct declaration that the duty on the finer cottons is to go also as soon as ever the condition of the finances will permit; and enunciation of the policy of endeavouring to make India one great free port, open to the commerce of the whole world.' It was not, indeed, given to him to carry out these great projects in a single year; but before he left India all his aims had been achieved, together with the measures needed to place the finances of the country in a secure position against the periodical recurrence of famine. The success of the financial policy he had in view would, Lord Lytton knew, depend upon his securing a first-rate Finance Minister to the Indian Government. That post, when he first arrived in India, was occupied by Sir William Muir, who resigned in the course of that year to accept a vacancy offered him on the India Council at home. Lord Lytton felt that, of all men in India, the one most qualified for such a post was Sir John Strachey, then Governor-General of the North-West Provinces. The post of Financial Member of Council was offered to him, and it was to Lord Lytton a source of never-ending gratitude that Sir John, under a high sense of personal obligation to public duty, consented to exchange a very comfortable and easy post for a very anxious and laborious one.' To the discharge of its difficult duties during a difficult period it was the Viceroy's opinion that few men could have brought greater courage and capacity.' Lord Lytton's tribute to Manchester, Speaking at Manchester in the year 1882 on the subject of Indian Finance Lord Lytton referred to Sir John Strachey in the following terms:- I cannot mention the name of that truly great Indian States- 1882 man without expressing my admiration of his genius as well as my lasting gratitude for his generous and courageous assistance in the government of India during a very critical and difficult period. Long distinguished in almost every branch of Indian administration, Sir John Strachey has now closed a career of laborious and far-reaching public usefulness by a remarkable series of financial measures with which his name will be permanently associated in the annals of Indian history as one of the most sagacious and beneficent financiers that India has ever had.' SALT DUTIES The conditions under which salt was produced and taxed in India at the commencement of Lord Lytton's Viceroyalty are thus described by Sir John Strachey, in his speech of March 15, 1877, introducing the Budget of 1877-8: Budget 1877 The circumstances under which the salt duties Strachey's are levied vary greatly in different parts of India. Speech, Bengal and Assam, with sixty-seven millions of March 15, people, get nearly the whole of their supply from Cheshire. . . . Almost the only local source within easy reach from which Bengal can obtain salt is the sea; and the natural facilities for making salt on the northern coasts of the Bay of Bengal are not great. The climate is so damp that salt cannot easily be obtained by the cheap process of solar evaporation; Salt Duties Strachey's Budget Speech, March 15, 1877 and, owing to the vast quantities of fresh water poured in by the Ganges and Brahmaputra, the sea is less salt than on the other shores of India. In Madras and Bombay, on the other hand, containing together about forty-seven millions of people, the manufacture of salt from the sea is cheap and easy, and for these Presidencies, as well as for the greater part of the Central Presidency and the Native States of Southern India, the sea is the great source of supply. Coming to Northern India, we find that the Punjab possesses inexhaustible supplies of rock salt, which is consumed by about fourteen millions of people. Throughout the North-West Provinces. and Oudh, and a portion of the Central Presidency and of the Punjab, on the other hand, although there are many places where more or less impure salts can be produced, the home sources for the supply of good salt can never be sufficient. Fortyseven millions of our own subjects depend almost entirely for their salt on the Native States of Rajputana, or on places on the confines of those States. The system under which the duty is levied, and the rate of duty, vary in the different provinces. In Madras and Bombay the rate of duty is Rs. 1-13 per maund; in Lower Bengal the rate is Rs. 3-4 per maund, and is levied chiefly in the form of a sea-Customs import duty. In the Upper Provinces the rate is Rs. 3 per maund. In the Punjab this is included in the selling price of the rock salt, which is the property of Government. In the rest of the Upper Provinces the duty is levied when the salt is imported from Rajputana. For this purpose, and to prevent the ingress of Budget 1877 salt taxed at lower rates, a Customs line is maintained Salt Duties extending from a point north of Attock to near Strachey's the Berar frontier, a distance of more than 1,500 Speech, miles. Similar lines some hundreds of miles in March 15, length are established in the Bombay Presidency, to prevent untaxed salt from Native States entering British territory. Along the greater part of this enormous system of inland Customs lines, which, if they were put down in Europe, would stretch from London to Constantinople, a physical barrier has been created comparable to nothing that I can think of except the Great Wall of China. It consists principally of an impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes, supplemented by stone walls and ditches, across which no human being or beast of burden or vehicle can pass without being subjected to detention and search. It is guarded by an army of some 8,000 men, the mass of whom receive as wages Rs. 6 or 7 a month. The bare statement of these facts is sufficient to show the magnitude of the evil. I 'Although I believe that everything is done which can be done under such circumstances to prevent abuses, it may be easily imagined what inevitable and serious obstruction to trade and annoyance and harassment to individuals must take place. remember a graphic account of Sir George Campbell, in which he described the evils of the system and the instruments, of the nature of cheese-tasters, which are thrust into the goods of everyone whose business takes him across the line. The interference is not confined to the traffic passing into British territory; for, owing to the levy of the export duty on sugar, the same obstructions are offered to the traffic passing in the other direction. In spite, however, of the H H |