The phenomena of the moral and industrial growth or
stagnation of a highly-endowed people must ever possess the
interest of fascination for those who take heed of the maxim that
"history is philosophy teaching by example." National prosperity
depends upon circumstances sufficiently general to make the
experience of one country of great value to another, though
ignorant Bourbon dynasties and Rump Congresses refuse to learn
the lesson. It is of the intimate every-day life of rural Bengal
that Mr. Hunter treats. He does not, like old historians, try our
patience with a bead-roll of names that have earned no just title
to remembrance, or dazzle us with a bountiful display of
"barbaric pearls and gold," or lead us in the gondolas of
Buddhist kings down sacred rivers, amid "a summer fanned with
spice"; but he describes the labours and the sufferings, the
mishaps and the good fortune, of thirty millions of people, who,
however dusky may be their hue, tanned by the tropical suns of
fifty centuries, are nevertheless members of the imperial Aryan
race, descended from the cool highlands eastward of the Caspian,
where, long before the beginning of recorded history, their
ancestors and those of the Anglo-American were indistinguishably
united in the same primitive community.
The narrative portion of the present volume is concerned mainly
with the social and economical disorganization wrought by the
great famine of 1770, and with the attempts of the English
government to remedy the same.
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