भारत में अंग्रेजी राज (पण्डित सुन्दरलाल - ब्रिटिश औपनिवेशिक लूट व षड्यन्त्रों का प्रामाणिक इतिहास)

३० पुस्तक प्रवेश
चुकी थीं, और जब कि औरङ्गज़ेब तक के शासनकाल में देश के पूरब से
पश्चिम और दक्खिन से उत्तर तक प्रजा में चारों ओर अलौकिक सुख
समृद्धि और सुशासन दिखाई देता था । निस्सन्देह मज़हब के नाम पर
इङ्गलिस्तान के अन्दर जिन भयङ्कर अत्याचारों का ऊपर ज़िक्र आया है,
उनके सामने औरङ्गज़ेब की धार्मिक सङ्कीर्णता भी उदारता थी । यही हालत
उस समय शेष अधिकांश यूरोप की थी । हमें यह भी याद रखना चाहिए
कि इङ्गलिस्तान की यह हालत १८ वीं सदी के शुरू तक बनी रही । इसी
population hardly reached five millions . . . It was a system of orga-
nized labour, the possession of land being a trust, not a property. But now
commerce was begining to disturb the foundations on which all these arrange-
ments had been sustained, and to compel a new distribution of population;
trading companies were being established ; men were unsettled by the rum-
ours or realities of immense fortunes rapidly gained in foreign adventure .
. . A nation so illiterate that many of its peers in Parliament could neither
read nor write, . . . to so great an extent had these immoralities gone that
it was openly asserted that there were one hundred thousand women in
England made dissolute by the clergy. . . . . The vilest crime in an
ecclesiastic might be commuted for money, six shillings and eight pence
being sufficient in the case of mortal sin. . . . the close of the seventeenth
century . . . London . . . was dirty, ill—built, without sanitary
provisions. . . . Wild animals roamed here and there. . . . In the rainy
seasons the roads were all but impassable . . . It was no uncommon thing
for persons to lose their way, and have to spend the night out in the air.
Between places of considerable importance the roads were sometimes very
little known, and such was the difficulty for wheeled carriages that a principal
mode of transport was by pack-horses, of which passengers took advantage,
stowing themselves away between the packs . . . Toward the close of the
century what were termed 'flying coaches' . . could move at the rate of
from thirty to fifty miles in a day . . . near the sources of the Tyne there
were people scarcely less savage than American Indians, their half-naked