"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."