engaged during the
last century would, in the eyes of many, certainly be considered as
expenditure incurred on objects which were of paramount interest to the
Indian taxpayers. Moreover, a whole category of British legislation
connected with fiscal matters has been undertaken, not so much with a
view to increase the revenue as with the object of distributing the
burthen of taxation equally amongst the different classes of society.
Much of this legislation has been perfectly justifiable and even
beneficial. Nevertheless, it should never be forgotten that it is
generally based on the purely Western principle that abstract justice is
in itself a desirable thing to attain, and that a fiscal or
administrative system stands condemned if it is wanting in symmetry. It
was against any extreme application of this principle that Burke
directed some of his most forcible diatribes.[18] It has been already
pointed out that the commendable want of intellectual symmetry which is
the inherited possession of the Englishman gives him a very great
advantage as an Imperialist agent over those trained in the rigid and
bureaucratic school of Continental Europe. But the Englishman is a
Western, albeit an Anglo-Saxon Western, and, from the point of view of
all processes of reasoning, the gulf which separates any one member of
the European family from another is infinitely less wide than that which
divides all Westerns from all Orientals. Even the Englishman, therefore,
is constrained--sometimes much against his will--to bow down in that
temple of Logic, the existence of which the Oriental is disposed
altogether to ignore. Indeed, sometimes the choice lies between the
enforcement on the reluctant Oriental of principles based on
logic--occasionally on the very simple science of arithmetic--or
abandoning the work of civilisation altogether. From this point of view,
the dangers to which the British Empire is exposed by reason of fiscal
measures are due not, as was the case with Rome, to barbarous, but
rather to ultra-scientific finance. The following is a case in point.

The land-tax has always been the principal source from which Oriental
potentates have derived their revenues. For all practical purposes it
may be said that the system which they have adopted has generally been
to take as much from the cultivators as they could get. Reformers, such
as the Emperor Akbar, have at times endeavoured to introduce more
enlightened methods of taxation, a