the worst in which the higher classes are so exclusively
composed. In India, public office has been, and must continue to be,
the only road to distinction, until we have a _law of primogeniture_,
and a _concentration of capital_. In India no man has ever thought
himself respectable, or been thought so by others, unless he is armed
with his little 'hukumat'; his 'little brief authority' under
Government, that gives him the command of some public establishment
paid out of the revenues of the State.[7] In Europe and America,
where capital has been concentrated in great commercial and
manufacturing establishments, and free institutions prevail almost as
the natural consequence, industry is everything; and those who direct
and command it are, happily, looked up to as the source of the
wealth, the strength, the virtue, and the happiness of the nation.
The concentration of capital in such establishments may, indeed, be
considered, not only as the natural consequence, but as the
prevailing cause of the free institutions by which the mass of the
people in European countries are blessed.[8] The mass of the people
were as much brutalized and oppressed by the landed aristocracy as
they could have been by any official aristocracy before towns and
higher classes were created by the concentration of capital.

The same observations are applicable to China. There the land all
belongs to the sovereign, as in India; and, as in India, it is liable
to the same eternal subdivision among the sons of those who hold it
under him. Capital is nowhere more concentrated in China than in
India; and all the great works that add to the fertility of the soil,
and facilitate the distribution of the land labour of the country are
formed by the sovereign out of the public revenue. The revenue is, in
consequence, one of office;[9] and no man considers himself
respectable,[10] unless invested with some office under Government,
that is, under the Emperor. Subdivision of labour, concentration of
capital, and machinery render an Englishman everywhere dependent upon
the co-operation of multitudes; while the Chinaman, who as yet knows
little of either, is everywhere independent, and able to work his way
among strangers. But this very dependence of the Englishman upon the
concentration of capital is the greatest source of his strength and
pledge of his security, since it supports those members of the higher
orders who can best understand and assert the rights an