Mr. Montgomery Martin, after examining…the condition of some provinces of Bengal and Behar, said in 1835 in his Eastern India: ‘It is impossible to avoid remarking two facts as peculiarly striking, first the richness of the country surveyed, and second, the poverty of its inhabitants… The annual drain of £3,000,000 on British India has amounted in thirty years, at compound interest, to the enormous sum of £723,900,000. So constant and accumulating a drain, even in England, would soon impoverish her. How severe then must be its effects on India when the wage of a labourer is from two pence to
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