s with his counsels in
sowing their maize and arranging their secular concerns. "Few," he adds
with the true breadth of genius which converted the Baptist shoemaker
into the Christian statesman and scholar, "who are extensively
acquainted with human life, will esteem these cares either unworthy of
religion or incongruous with its highest enjoyments." When Carey
wrote, the millions of five-acre farmers in India were only beginning
to recover from the oppression and neglect of former rulers and the
visitation of terrific famines. Trade was as depressed as agriculture.
Transit duties, not less offensive than those of the Chinese, continued
to weigh down agricultural industry till Lord W. Bentinck's time and
later. The English Government levied an unequal scale of duties on the
staples of the East and West Indies, against which the former
petitioned in vain. The East India Company kept the people in
ignorance, and continued to exclude the European capitalist and captain
of labour. The large native landholders were as uneducated as the
cultivators. Before all Carey set these reforms: close attention to
the improvement of land, the best method of cropping land, the
introduction of new and useful plants, the improvement of the
implements of husbandry, the improvement of live stock, the bringing of
waste lands under cultivation, the improvement of horticulture. He
went on to show that, in addition to the abundance which an improved
agriculture would diffuse throughout the country, the surplus of grain
exported, besides "her opium, her indigo, her silk, and her cotton,"
would greatly tend to enrich India and endear Britain to her. "Whatever
may be thought of the Government of Mr. Hastings and those who
immediately preceded him for these last forty years, India has
certainly enjoyed such a Government as none of the provinces of the
Persian or the Roman Empire ever enjoyed for so great a length of time
in succession, and, indeed, one almost as new in the annals of modern
Europe as in those of India."

Carey found one of the greatest obstacles to agricultural progress to
be the fact that not one European owned a single foot of the soil, "a
singular fact in the history of nations," removed only about the time
of his own death. His remarks on this have a present significance:--

"It doubtless originated in a laudable care to preserve our Indian
fellow-subjects from insult and violence, which it was feared could
scarcely be d