During the ten years which ended with 1894 the seasons were all favorable, generally speaking, although local failures of harvests occurred here and there in districts of several provinces, but they were not sufficient in area, duration or intensity to affect the material conditions of the people.  The ten succeeding years, however, ending with 1904 witnessed a succession of calamities that were unprecedented either in India or anywhere else on earth, with the exception of a famine that occurred in the latter part of the eighteenth century.  Those ten years not only saw two of the worst famines, but repeated visitations of widespread and fatal epidemics.  It is estimated that during the ten years ending December, 1903, a million and a half of deaths were caused by the bubonic plague alone, and that the mortality from that pestilence was small in comparison with that caused by cholera, fever and famine.  The effects of those epidemics had been to hamper trade, to alarm and demoralize the people, to obstruct foreign commerce, prevent investments and the development of material resources.  Yet during the years 1902 and 1903 throughout all India there was abundant prosperity.  This restoration of prosperity is most noticeable in several of the districts that suffered most severely from famine.  To a large measure the agricultural population have been restored to their normal condition.

It is difficult in a great country like India where wages are so small and the cost of living is so insignificant compared with our own country, to judge accurately of the condition of the laboring classes.  The empire is so vast and so diverse in all its features that a statement which may accurately apply to one province will misrepresent another.  But, taking one consideration with another, as the song says, and drawing an average, it is plainly evident that the peasant population of India is slowly improving in condition.  The scales of wages have undoubtedly risen; there has been an improvement in the housing and the feeding of the masses; their sanitary condition has been radically changed, although they have fought against it, and the slow but gradual development of the material resources of the country promises to make the improvement permanent.

The chief source of revenue in India from ancient times has been a share in the crops of the farmers.  The present system has been handed down through the centuries with very little modification, and as three-fifths of the people are entirely and directly dependent upon the cultivation of the land, the whole fabric of society has been based upon that source of wealth.  The census gives 191,691,731 people as agriculturists, of whom 131,000,000 till their own or rented land, 18,750,000 receive incomes as landlord owners and the remainder are agricultural laborers.  The landlord caste are the descendants of hereditary chiefs, of former revenue farmers and persons of importance to whom land grants were made in ancient times.