needs of the Hindoo and Mohammedan cultivators as flowing from the
relation of the people to the soil. India was in truth a land of
millions of peasant proprietors on five-acre farms, rack-rented or
plundered by powerful middlemen, both squeezed or literally tortured
by the Government of the day, and driven to depend on the usurer for
even the seed for each crop. War and famine had alternated in
keeping down the population. Ignorance and fear had blunted the
natural shrewdness of the cultivator. A foul mythology, a saddening
demon-worship, and an exacting social system, covered the land as
with a pall. What even Christendom was fast becoming in the tenth
century, India had been all through the eighteen Christian
centuries.

The boy who from eight to fourteen "chose to read books of science,
history, voyages, etc., more than others"; the youth whose gardener
uncle would have had him follow that calling, but whose sensitive
skin kept him within doors, where he fitted up a room with his
botanical and zoological museum; the shoemaker-preacher who made a
garden around every cottage-manse in which he lived, and was
familiar with every beast, bird, insect, and tree in the Midlands of
England, became a scientific observer from the day he landed at
Calcutta, an agricultural reformer from the year he first built a
wooden farmhouse in the jungle, as the Manitoba emigrant now does
under very different skies, and then began to grow and make indigo
amid the peasantry at Dinapoor. He thus unconsciously reveals
himself and his method of working in a letter to Morris of
Clipstone:--

"MUDNABATI, 5th December 1797.--To talk of continuance of friendship
and warm affection to you would be folly. I love you; and next to