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AGRICULTURAL REFORM
IN INDIA.

BY

A. 0. HUME, C.B.,

LATE SECKETARY TO THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA IN THE DEPARTMENT OF REVENUE,
AGRICULTURE, AND COMMERCE.

LONDON:

W. H. ALLEN & CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE,
PALL MALL, S.W.

PUBLISHERS TO THE INDIA OFFICE.

1879.

LONDON :
PRINTED BT W. H, ALL£N AND CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE.

PREFACE

This paper, written many montlis ago, had been long
in type, when the Government emphasised many of
the remarks that it contains by aboHshing altogether
the Department of Agriculture.

This Department has never, as fully explained in
this pamphlet, been able to effect much where Agri-
culture was concerned, but it was working in a
right direction ; it knew what was required, and from
time to time, when allowed a chance, did a little good
on its own motion, or supported and assisted the
efforts of others in this direction.

So long as it existed, there was always some one at
the Head- quarters of the Government of India who
possessed a knowledge of these subjects, and was at
hand to support and advocate the sanction of all

IV PREFACE.

reasonable and practicable projects for improving in
any way, however humble, the Agriculture of the
country. So long as it existed, there was always a
hope, that amid the vicissitudes to which public affairs
are subject, some lucky turn of the wheel might bring
more enlightened ideas on these subjects into vogue,
and thus render possible its conversion into a real,
working Agricultural Bureau.

All this has passed away, and the only hope for
India now lies in the chance that the real bearings
and vital importance of the questions herein discussed
may be better understood and appreciated in England
than they have ever been, since Lord Mayo's death,
by those in power in India.

A. 0. HUME,

Simla,

July \st, 1879.

UlUC

AGRICULTURAL REFORM
IN INDIA.

Recent and oft-recurring famines have revived, to a
slight extent, the feeble interest which has occasionally,
in past times, been evinced in regard to agriculture in
India.

Some few people are found who ask whether im-
proved husbandry might not do much to mitigate the
intensity and limit the areas of these calamities.

Others, looking to India's present impecuniosity, to
the difficulties involved in any very material reduction
in her present expenditure, to the urgent necessities
that must arise in the future for increased expendi-
ture, to the comparatively slow growth of existing
sources of revenue and the apparent impracticability
of opening out new sources that her populations
would accept without dangerous dissatisfaction, en-
quire whether the time has not come for a careful
reconsideration of our management of the land of the
country. The land revenue in all historical periods
has been the main financial resource of every succes-
sive Grovernment, Hindoo or Mahomedan. We have
done much for the country, have enormously increased

1

[ 2 ]

the value of its produce, yet province for province we
are not receiving mucli more than many of our prede-
cessors, Akbar for instance, did. Are we really
making the most out of the land ?

Philanthropic manufacturers of agricultural ma-
chines, introducers of new forage plants, patentees
of improved cattle food and the like, overcome by the
woes of the Indian ryot, are perpetually dinning into
the ears of the authorities and the public their unsel-
fish anxiety to regenerate the country by supplying it
with their wares on a large scale.

One way or another a dim conception seems to be
gaining ground that, perhaps, we have left well (or
ill?) alone too long, and that possibly a systematic
improvement in its agriculture might prove a remedy
for many of India's present troubles.

This is not the first time that some little stir has
been made about this matter. The orbit is not cal-
culable, but a certain periodicity has been observed,
and every ten or fifteen years the idea has emerged
into the blaze of public opinion. Whether this time
it is destined to develop into a permanent source of
light, or once more, its perihelion passed, to dart off
into the space of oblivion, cannot be foretold. The
chances are, it is to be feared, greatly in favour of the
latter ; but who can tell ? The laws of mind are not
as those of matter ; and anyhow, so long as a chance
exists, all, however humble, who hope and believe —
hope that at last the time may have arrived for ener-
getic and sufficient action in this matter, and believe
that that action will confer great and lasting benefits
on a considerable fraction of mankind — are bound, so

[ 3 ]

far as in tliem lies, to endeavour to lead others to the
same hope and belief.

Most certainly the question, are we making the
most out of the land, must be answered in the nega-
tive; but this, not through any imperfection in the
existing revenue administration, but because the land
itself yields nothing like what it should.

It is undeniable that in the tenures we have created,
and the systems we have adopted, there have been
grave errors. Take, for instance, the Permanent
Settlement of Bengal. Here, as elsewhere in India,
the ruling power was the sole proprietor of the land.
Other people enjoyed various classes of occupancy
rights, and could not, according to custom, be de-
prived of these (though they often were so by our
predecessors) so long as they continued to pay the
demand of the ruling power, which again, though in
practice often only limited by rebellion, ought to have
been, according to tradition, one-sixth of the gross
produce, or again, which according to custom is the
same thing, one-half of what the actual cultivator paid
the middleman who made the collections. No doubt
over vast tracts the produce was nominally equally
divided between cultivator and middleman (adh-huttai
as this division is called), but as a matter of fact,
owing to the frauds of the cultivators, we may say
broadly, that these never did over any large area, for
any prolonged period, yield more than one- third of
the gross produce to the State collectors, middlemen,
zemindars, &c. who, in various parts of the empire, at
various periods, have been the primary recipients of
the dues of the soil.

1 *

[ 4 ]

It would be foreign to my present purpose to enter
further into details here. Suffice it to say that the
State, even if strictly adhering to traditional usage,
retained the right to share in any increased pro-
ductiveness in its property, and similarly to in-
crease the tale of its demand if prices of produce rose,
or the value of the currency fell.

In Bengal, with the most laudable intentions, we
relinquished this right. We began by fixing a demand
higher than the existing condition of affairs justified
according to traditional theory, but not higher than
what our immediate predecessors had 'taken, and this
demand we stereotyped for ever.

Time has rolled on ; a roadless wilderness has been
traversed in all directions by railways and roads;
under our protecting rule a vast internal and foreign
commerce has been developed, prices of agricultural
produce have risen, new and extremely remunerative
staples have been introduced, and vast tracts of waste
have come under the plough, but our demand remains
the same as it was seventy years ago, and is pro-
bably between four and five* millions less than it

* It will be doubtless urged that, according to the road cess
returns, the gross rental is barely 13 millions, and that therefore
at the outside the Government demand could not have exceeded
6| millions, or say 3j millions in excess of its present amount.
The writer, on the other hand, is confident, looking to area, soils,
rates, and population that the "assets" of Bengal, as calculated
for a North- West Province settlement, are not under 16 millions,
and probably exceed this considerably.

Years ago, when the Bengal population was assumed at from 40
to 44 millions, the writer, from similar considerations, asserted
in a printed memorandum to Government that it could not be

L 5 J

would have been at the present moment had our pre-
decessors contented themselves in Bengal, as else-
where, with fixing the demand for periods of twenty
or thirty years.

These extra millions would have made the adminis-
tration easy. We should never have heard of license
and income taxes, hateful to the country, however
equitable in theory ; famine expenditure would not, as
now, have involved proximate insolvency, and nine-
tenths of the fiscal measures of the last fifteen years,
which have created a more or less sore feeling in every
section and grade of the community, would have been
unnecessary.

Had the country gained by it, we might derive some
consolation in looking back on this stupendous error.
But the result has been only to create a multitude of
absentee landlords and rent-charge holders, and to
leave the masses, except in particular localities,*
worse off and more miserable than those of any other
part of the empire.

Again, throughout large tracts elsewhere, we have
created middlemen and converted into joint proprie-
tors with ourselves men formerly only representatives
of a community, men anciently only jprimi inter pares,
collecting for a small honorarium the dues of their

less tlian 60 millions. Everybody ridiculed the idea, and many
excellent jokes were made at his expense, hut, three years later,
the first census was taken, and the population was proved to be
66 millions.

* The Mahomedan cultivators of Eastern Bengal, whose turbu-
lent pugnacity has enabled them to hold their own to a certain
extent, must be excepted.

[ 6 ]

brethren, now lording it as masters, and intercepting
one-half of the State dues.

In these and similar cases we are doubtless not now
getting by perhaps eight millions a year as much as
we might have done, but for the well-meant errors of
our predecessors. But these are accomplished facts ;
they have been built into the very foundations of the
new social order that has arisen under our rule, and
no wise or competent ruler could now dream of
changes in these directions. For good or for evil,
there they are, and there they must remain, unless
we desire to shake society to its base and risk the
overthrow of the fabric on which three generations
have laboured.

Broadly speaking, accepting these tenures and sys-
tems that we have created, and of which we cannot
and must not even try to rid ourselves, it may be
safely asserted that we are making as much on the
whole out of the land as, in its present condition, we
can.

It is only necessary, at any rate for those who
understand these questions, to read the more recent
Settlement Eeports of any of the temporarily-settled
provinces, such as Bombay, the J^orth- Western Pro-
vinces, the Punjab, to realise the patience and re-
search, the care and intelHgence, with which the
assessment of the Government land revenue is now
conducted.

Certainly, making due allowance where settlements
have been running for some time, for improvements
that railways, canals, and other less direct causes have
effected in the value of produce, as a whole we are

[ 7 ]

taking as much from the land as we can, consistently
with not injuring the capital value of our property.
Like all great works, the workmanship varies some-
what in quality, and it is only in human nature to err
at times. Districts, both somewhat under and some-
what over assessed, might easily be indicated, but
taking a wide purview no competent authority can
deny that, conditioned as it is by the irrevocable
acts of the past, the land revenue administration is,
on the whole, making as much out of the land as it
can fairly be expected, as now worked, to yield to
Government.

If, then, our revenue from land is to undergo any
very marked development, and to bear hereafter that
proportion to the rest of our revenues that in the
times gone by it has always borne, it is to an increase
in the produce of the land, to an. improved system of
agriculture in fact, that we must look.

And here it is due to the patient, frugal, and not
unintelligent husbandmen of India to admit freely
that, looking to the conditions under which they
labour, their ignorance of scientific method, and their
want of capital (and all that capital enables a farmer
to command), the crops that they do produce are, on
the whole, surprising.

So far as rule-of-thumb goes, the experience of
3,000 years has not been wholly wasted. They know
to a day when it is best (if only meteorological condi-
tions permit) to sow each staple and each variety of
each staple that is grown in their neighbourhood;
they know the evils of banks and hedges, dwarfing
the crops on either side and harbouring vermin, and

[ 8 ]

will have none of tliem ; they accurately distinguish
every* variety of soil, and, so far as the crops they
grow are concerned, the varying properties and capa-
cities of each; they fully realise the value (though
they can command but little) of ordinary manure,
ashes, and the like, and recognise which are most re-
quired by which kind of crops ; they know the advan-
tages of ploughing, in most cases as deep as their
imperfect implements and feeble teams will permit,
and of thoroughly pulverising the soil ; and they also
recognise where, with a scanty or no supply of manure,
it would be folly to break the shallow-lying pan. As
for weeds, their wheat-fields would, in this respect.

* Nothing, indeed, is more perplexing than the enormous
number of names applied by native agriculturists to soils, the
more so that probably almost every district rejoices in at least a
dozen purely local names which are unknown elsewhere. There is
no real confusion, however. Native cultivators as keenly appre-
ciate the smallest differences in the relative qualities of different
soils as do the best European farmers, but the fact is that inde-
pendent of names indicative of the quality of the soil (and often
to the entire exclusion of these) they make use, in describing their
land, of names having reference to external conditions, the fre-
quency or recency of cultivation therein, its situation as regards
inhabited sites, &c., its position as upland or recently-formed allu-
vium, its occupation for pasture, fields, or gardens, its external
features, &c. &c. Nothing is more common than to hear soils
referred to as such, by names which really only indicate features
or circumstances altogether external to the soil itself and inde-
pendent of its intrinsic quality. This is no doubt inaccurate, but
it is very natural since the value to the agriculturist of any land
will often depend far more on these external circumstances than
on the inherent quality of the soil, which latter, moreover, will, as
time goes on, be often greatly modified by the former, as where
" hhoor " or light sandy soil, becomes in course of time, by prox-
imity to a village, constant cultivation and manuring, a kind of
*• do mut" between garden mould and rich loam.

[ 9 ]

shame ninety-nine hundredths of those in Europe.
You may stand on some high old barrow-like village
site in Upper India, and look down on all sides on one
wide sea of waving wheat broken only by dark-green
islands of mango groves — many, many square miles of
wheat and not a weed or blade of grass above six
inches in height to be found amongst it. What is to
be spied out creeping here and there on the ground is
only the growth of the last few weeks, since the corn
grew too high and thick to permit the women and
children to continue weeding. They know when to
feed down a too forward crop ; they know the benej&t
of, and practise, so far as circumstances and poverty
permit, a rotation of crops. They are great adepts in
storing grain, and will turn it out of rough earthen
pits, after twenty years, absolutely uninjured. They
know the exact state of ripeness to which grain should
be allowed to stand in different seasons; in other
words, under different meteorological conditions, to
ensure its keeping when thus stored ; and equally the
length of time that, under varying atmospheric con-
ditions, it should lie upon the open threshing-floor to
secure the same object.

Imperfect appliances, superstition, money troubles,
and the usurer's impatience, often prevent their prac-
tising what they do know, but so far as what may be
called non- scientific agriculture is concerned, there is
little to teach them, and certainly very few European
farmers could, fettered by the same conditions as our
ryots, produce better, if as good, crops.

On the other hand, we must not over-rate their
knowledge ; it is wholly empirical, and is in many

[ 10 ]

parts of tlie country, if not everywHere, greatly
limited in its application by tradition and superstition.
Innumerable quaint couplets, to whicli a certain reve-
rence is attached, deal with agricultural matters.
These, in Upper India at any rate, are true " house-
hold words " amongst all tillers of the soil. These
govern their actions to a great extent, and often lead
them wrong against their better judgment. They
take omens of all kinds to guide their choice of crops
and other operations of husbandry, and though some
few of the more intelligent only act upon the results
of these divinations when they coincide with their own
views, the masses are blindly guided by them.

So, then, it is not only external disadvantages
against which the Indian cultivator has to contend,
it is not only that his knowledge is still in the primary
experience stage, but that even this knowledge is often
rendered of no avail by the traditions of anj imme-
morial religion of agriculture.

It is necessary to realise* this (of which few Euro-
peans ever even hear), as it is one great practical
difficulty against which agricultural reform in India
will have to contend.

What other Grovernment is so favoured as that of
India? A fertile soil, and nine-tenths of it (excluding
Lower Bengal) still so far the property of the State,
that the latter can, and does, levy a full rent on all

* To give some more definite idea of this superstition, a brief
extract from an unpublished Memoir on the Agriculture of the
Doab is reproduced as Note A., at the close of this paper.

[ 11 ]

of it — a rent whicli it can periodically enhance as
circumstances enable the land to bear it.

And yet we are always in difficulty about money.*
Conceive the Groyernment of Great Britain similarly
situated, and yet having to levy income taxes, and
license taxes, and the like.

Well may the people of India cry out against inno-
vations like these, and say, '^ the State keeps all the
land in the country; this ought to suffice for any Gro-
vernment ; if it does not, the Government, whatever
its other merits, is too dear at the price." And this
is the feeling that is slowly, but surely, creeping over
the face of the empire. It is not the confirmed mal-
contents only, these must always be numerous in a
country governed by foreigners; it is equally those
best affected to our rule who begin to say, " The
Government means well, it does much for us, it gives
us peace internally, but this is a poor country, and
the Government costs too much ! '*

We must be blind indeed to the teachings of history
if we cannot, to some extent, foretell to what this
must ultimately lead.

Now that the people feel so keenly the costliness of
the Government is due in some degree to unwise and
unnecessary expenditure,! but mainly to the fact that
our land revenue, not having advanced in proportion

* Tlie writer can remember no period witliin tlie last twenty-
years, when any attempts to obtain funds for agricultural im-
provements were not negatived on the ground of financial
pressure.

t This is too large a question to enter on here, though one
branch of it has been glanced at in a later portion of this paper.

[ 12 ]

to the growth in other directions of the empire, money
has had to be raised in ways which, however equit-
able in principle, are opposed to the traditions and
repugnant to the feelings of the people.

Were our land revenue now only thirty instead
of twenty-two millions, our expenditure might be pre-
cisely what it is, and yet no one, malcontent or other-
wise, would ever have grumbled. All the money we
needed would have been obtained by what the people
consider constitutional and legitimate means, and so
long as we adhered to old-established lines and intro-
duced no new forms of taxation (and we should have
needed none had our land revenue been what it should)
we were welcome to spend all we got and, for all the
masses cared, how we pleased.

That our land revenue has not kept pace with the
general development is due to two causes : —

The first, mistakes in system, already alluded to —
mistakes now irremediable.

The second, our absolute neglect, though sole or
part proprietors of the major portion of the land, to
attempt the smallest improvement on a primitive sys-
tem of agriculture, stereotyped two thousand years
ago, when the conditions and requirements of the
country were utterly unlike what they are now, and
when scientific method was undreamt of.

So long as we hold the country and see a fair pro-
spect of continuing to hold it for another quarter of a
century, it can never be too late to repair this second
error, and the sooner we boldly face the necessity of
doing this, and take action on a scale commensurate
with the greatness of the task, the sooner we shall

[ 13 ]

extricate ourselves from the trying position in which
we are now placed, and relieve the country of troubles
mainly due to our own past, unintentional, misman-
agement.

And here the reader may possibly think that some
injustice is being done to our administration, and re-
membering that eight years or so ago a good deal
was heard of the establishment, under Lord Mayo's
auspices, of an Agricultural Department in India, may
ask how the existence of this special department is
compatible with such an entire neglect of agricultural
reform as has been asserted.

The answer is simple : There is not, and never
has been, any real Agricultural Department in India.
There is a Miscellaneous Department of the Govern-
ment of India, which, amongst its various titles, bears
the word *' Agriculture," but that Department has
not, and cannot, from the nature of things, exercise
any potential influence on the agriculture of the
country quoad which it is a vox et prceterea nihih

Nothing is more calculated to deter earnest men
from exerting themselves to secure for India that
agricultural development of which she stands so
grievously in need than the belief (erroneous as it is)
that there already exists a special local organisation
for this very purpose, and I propose, therefore, to
explain —

What the so-called Agricultural Department really
does;

How, though bearing this title, it has done, and (as
at present constituted) can do, nothing (worthy the
name) to reform Indian agriculture ;

[ 14 ]

What organisation is necessary to any real and
efl&cient Department of Agriculture in India, and tlie
urgent need in which the country stands of this.

Lastly I shall, by way of illustration, glance at some
few of the more important problems that would pro-
bably, at the outset, engage the attention of any such
Department.

What the so-called Department of Agriculture really
does and has done.

Although circumstances (to be explained later) had
deprived Lord Mayo's new department of all claim to
be considered an Agricultural Bureau, its formation
marked an era in the history of the country, and
served a most useful purpose. In it were gathered
up into one homogeneous whole numberless branches
of the administration, all more or less potential factors
in the material progress of the empire. Branches,
therefore, scattered amongst the different secretariats
of the Government of India, to be attended to or not,
as the more obligatory business of these secretariats
might, from time to time, permit ; and when obtaining
attention, dealt with too often by ofi&cers necessarily
possessing neither the special knowledge nor the ex-
perience essential to their satisfactory direction.

The administration of the Forest Department was
transferred from the Public Works Secretariat, and
with it the immediate control of a large staff. This
involved the general direction of the demarcation, con-

[ 15 ]

servation, and improvement of all State forests in
the Bengal Presidency, of the supply of timber and
firewood to State Departments and the general public,
of the formation of new plantations, the reboisment of
denuded tracts, and the other very varied operations
of this extensive Department.*

From the Military Department was transferred all
business connected with studs and horse-breeding.
From the Financial Department the supervision of
the Department of Inland Customs, and salt matters
generally, including all correspondence connected — at
first with the maintenance and guard, and later with
the gradual abolition,! of the vast customs' barrier,
then extending across the continent of India from
above Attock to near Cuttack ; with the working of
the great salt mines in the Punjab and the Sambhur

* Although the Secretary possesses some knowledge of forestry,
and has co-operated cordially with Colonel Pearson, Mr. Baden-
Powell, and Dr. Brandis, who have successively (the first two
officiating) held under him the office of Inspector- G-eneral of
Forests, the real credit for the enormous progress effected in
forest administration, since the formation of the Revenue, Agricul-
ture, and Commerce Department, is primarily due to Dr. Brandis,
the founder, in India, of scientific forestry.

t This, though the proposal was of old standing, and the mea-
sure has received the approval, and more or less the support, of
Lords Lawrence, Mayo, Northbrook, and Lytton, was more
especially the Secretary's work. Its feasibility depended on the
negotiation of a series of treaties with numerous native states.
Writing of this recently, the Secretary of State remarked (De-
spatch No. 3 of 6th February 1879, para. 8) : — " I entirely concur
in the high appreciation of Mr. Hume's long and valuable ser-
vices expressed by your Excellency's G-overnment ; for to him, as
you observe, is due the initiation, prosecution, and completion of
that policy which has led to the agreements entered into with the
several states concerned."

L 16 ]

lake, and with all measures relating to ihe security
and development of the salt revenue in India, and
the reduction of the price of this necessary to con-
sumers.

From the Foreign Department was taken over the
control of all matters connected with Land Revenue
and Settlements in the non-regulation provinces ; and
from the Home Department all similar work pertain-
ing to the regulation provinces.

The business thus devolving on the new Depart-
ment included all questions connected with the settle-
ment and assessment of the land in all that portion
of India which is not permanently settled (i.e, nearly
the whole empire with the exception of the major por-
tion of Lower Bengal and the Benares division) ; all
questions connected with waste lands, and their grant
in lease or fee-simple to European and other settlers ;
all questions connected with the alienation of the State
revenue derived from the land ; all questions con-
nected with the imposition of local taxes and cesses
on the land, and later, when an Act was passed pro-
viding for the making of pecuniary advances by the
State to aid the landholder or cultivator in improving
his land, all questions connected with the working of
that Act.

From the Home Department also, the following
other branches of work were transferred : —

Surveys. — Under this head were included the direc-
tion of the Trigonometrical, Topographical, Revenue,
and Geological Surveys, and the administration of the
vast establishments charged with their execution.
Connected with the Greological Survey were explora-

[ 17 ]

tions for minerals, — coal, petroleum, &c., and the
grant of leases and concessions to individuals or com-
panies desirous of searching for, or working these in
various parts of the country.

Industry, Science, and Art, — Including questions
connected with the representation of India at Exhibi-
tions in Europe, America, and Australia ; the hold-
ing of art and other exhibitions in this country ; the
general control of museums of natural history and
economic products of such scientific matters as the
maintenance of astronomical observatories and the
arrangements for observing solar eclipses, the transit of
Yenus, and securing daily photographs of the sun; also
all questions connected with industrial products, and
the encouragement and development of local industries.

Meteorology. — Including the administration of the
Meteorological Department, and the initiation and
control of a system for the regular record and weekly
or daily publication of reports on atmospheric varia-
tions and the prospects of the seasons.

Agriculture and Horticulture, — Including the general
direction and control of model and experimental farms
and botanic gardens ; the introduction of new products,
and of improved varieties of those already grown in
the country ; the introduction of new implements,
and the improvement of those used by cultivators ; the
improvement of stock, and the prevention and cure of
cattle disease; the conduct of operations connected
with the cultivation of chinch ona and the preparation
from its bark of a really cheap and efficient febrifuge.

Fibres and SilJc. — Including all questions connected
with the improvement of the quality of Indian cotton,

2

[ 18 ]

and the development of fhe trade in it ; tlie improve-
ment and development of Indian silk, the produce of
the domesticated as well as of the wild worms ; the
introduction of suitable machinery for the treatment
of rheea ; the development of paper-making from fibres
grown in the country, and the experimental cultivation
of new or hitherto little known and neglected fibres.

Fisheries. — The whole of the inland and sea fisheries
of the different provinces of India were systematically
inspected and reported upon under the orders of this
department, and measures taken, where necessary, in
communication with Local Grovernments, for their con-
servation. A scientific manual of Indian Fishes by
Dr. Day was also arranged for and has been pub-
lished.

Port Blair and the Nicobars. — The administration
of these settlements was vested in this department,
and remained with it for over a year and a half, when,
for reasons of administrative convenience, the work
was retransferred to the Home Department.

Sanitation, — Questions connected with rural, urban,
and army sanitation, and the organisation and work-
ing of the Sanitary Department, and the administra-
tion of lock hospitals. This work was retransferred
about twenty-seven months later to the Home Depart-
ment.

Municipalities. — Including all questions connected
with municipal taxation and municipal government
generally ; the making of loans to municipalities for
the execution of projects of local improvement, and
cognate matters. This work was, after five and a
half years, retransferred to the Home Department.

[ 19 ]

Emigration. — Including the regulation and control
of emigration from India to British and Foreign colo-
nies, and correspondence connected with the treatment
of the emigrants there, and their return to India ; also
all correspondence connected with emigration to the tea
districts of Assam, and State schemes of emigration,
such as the emigration from Bengal to Burmah in
1874, during the famine in Behar, and the emigration
of agriculturists to the Central Provinces from other
over-populated tracts.

Statistics. — Operations connected with the Weights
and Measures Act (a dead letter), the taking of the
census of India, and the preparation of a Gazetteer,
based on the results of an elaborate statistical survey.

To all these departments were added ; —

In 1874 — All correspondence connected with mer-
chant shipping, lights, buoys, and beacons, ports and
port dues, pilots and pilotage.

In the same year — The administration of a new
department then constituted for the purpose of sur-
veying systematically all the coasts and harbours of
India, issuing charts of the same to the public, pub-
lishing hydrographic notices and notices of dangers to
navigation, and changes in positions of lights and
buoys, registers of wrecks, and accounts of light-
houses and light-vessels.

In 1875 — The compilation of statistics of trade, sea-
borne and inland, for the whole empire, their collation
and prompt publication, with explanatory notices and
reviews of the figures, involving detailed enquiries
into the commercial and industrial aspects of the
country.

2 *

[ 20 ]

In 1876 — The administration of the sea customs
revenue, bringing with it the control of all the custom
houses, and the discussion of all matters connected
with the tariff of import and export duties.

II.

Why the Agricultural Department has not done, and
never can do {as at present constituted), anything
material for the improvement of Indian Agriculture,

The organisation essential to any efficient Bureau of
Agriculture, and the urgent need in which India stands
of such a department.

The above brief resume of the work with which the
Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce
has been charged, and of the very numerous subjects
dealt with in it, might, to a certain extent, be held to
explain why so little, comparatively, has been done
where agriculture is concerned.

It might, with much show of reason, be argued that
with such an inordinate variety of questions to deal
with, with such a vast mass of operations of the most
diverse kinds, to direct, control, or supervise, no small
department, with a single Secretary and Under Secre-
tary, could possibly find time, after disposing of current
work that inevitably came before it, to make new work,
such as any effective action in the direction of agricul-
tural improvement must involve.

This explanation, this argument, however valid per
se, would not fully or sufficiently state the case.

[ 21, ]

Despite its heavy normal work, this Department has
found the time to introduce more or less important
reforms in the majority of the other branches with
which it is supposed to deal. It has continually, and
it is believed usefully, made new work for itself and
carried out that work. It is in agriculture only that
the Department, conceived originally mainly as an
instrument for agricultural reform, has done next to
nothing, and the reasons for this lamentable anomaly
are to be sought for in causes widely different from
the mere pressure of other work.

Though originally designated the Department of
Agriculture, &c., this Department has never, from the
first, been so constituted as to permit of its dealing
either directly or efficiently with agricultural matters.

Lord Mayo's conception was one thing, the sadly
modified scheme that as the result of vehement oppo-
sition he was compelled to accept, another. Lord
Mayo accepted this as a sort of instalment, as a grant
of ground on which he might later build what was
necessary, but no one was more thoroughly alive to
the fact than himself, that in the shape in which his
cherished project ultimately saw the light, it afforded
little or no prospect of material improvement in agri-
culture. He believed that in a few years this might
all be changed, and had he lived, this might have been
so, but he fully realised the position, and his invari-
able reply to protests on this subject were : " We
must have patience ; it will all come right."

Lord Mayo clung, however, to the idea of ultimately
making this reall}^ a Department of Agriculture, but
the Secretary of State did not approve of even this.

[ 22 ]

Lord Majo named it the Department of Agricul-
ture, Eevenue, and Commerce. The Secretary of State
objected to this, said that Revenue, and not Agricul-
ture, was the main object of the Department, and
ordered the name to be altered* to " Revenue, Agri-
culture, and Commerce."

Lord Mayo selected as head of the Department, an
officer whom, from his own thoroughf knowledge of
the subject, he ascertained to be well versed in prac-
tical European agriculture, who had, for his own in-
formation and amusement, farmed in a small experi-

* Extract paras. 3 and 4 of a despatch (No. 27 of tlie 3rd
August 1871) of Her Majesty's Secretary of State for India, to
His Excellency the Governor- General of India in Council.

" 3. I consider, however, that the change that has been made in
the designation enjoined in paragraph 20 of my despatch of the
22nd September 1870, No. 61, by transposing the words Revenue
and Agriculture, is objectionable, as giving rise to the notion that
the revenue subjects, which are undoubtedly of the first import-
ance, are not so esteemed by the authorities in this country or in
India. Of such paramount importance are these subjects, that it
is obviously necessary that the officer appointed to the post of
Secretary in this Department should always be chosen on account
of his knowledge of the subjects connected with revenue, rather
than from any knowledge which he may possess of agricultural or
commercial matters.

" 4. I must, therefore, direct you to revert to the title settled
by my despatch above alluded to, which, indeed, is the designation
most frequently made use of by your Excellency in Council in the
Resolution of the 6th of June."

t Lord Mayo was probably the only Governor- General who has
farmed for a livelihood and made a living out of it. "When he
came of age (he was then Mr. Bourke), his father (whose elder
brother was still living) could not afford to make him any allow-
ance, but rented to him one of his farms to make what he could
out of it. This Lord Mayo farmed himself (" Many a day," he
used to say, " have I stood the livelong day in the market selling
my beasts,") and made enough out of it to enable him to attend
Parliament regularly from after Easter to the end of the Session.

[ 23 ]

mental way throughout his many years of service in
India as a District Officer, and who was fairly conversant
with all the then more modern German and English
writings on the theory and practice of agriculture.

The Secretary of State remarked (replying as it were
ofl&cially to what Lord Mayo had written to him on
this subject privately or demi-ofl&cially) that the next
head of the Department was to be chosen for his
knowledge of revenue and not of agricultural matters.

It will be seen, therefore, that, as constituted, this
Department never was, and never was intended by
the Home Government to be, a Department of Agri-
culture. Lord Mayo hoped to convert it into this,
but with his death India lost the warmest, most com-
petent, and, at the same time, most influential advo-
cate for agricultural reform, j^o change, such as he
contemplated, has ever been made in the constitution
of the Department, and succeeding administrations
have only made the official bonds more rigid, and con-
verted its chief more and more thoroughly into a mere
desk-tied Secretary.

A Secretariat is under no circumstances the form
of organisation best suited to the promotion of agri-
cultural development. Still even a Secretariat might
do much if it possessed three needful adjuncts :

(1.) Competent advisers, not tied to an office, but
able to move about, collect and digest the necessary
facts, and put schemes before it in a shape in which
sound decisions can be arrived at.

(2.) A qualified agency, either of its own, or belong-
ing to administrations subordinate to it, to give effect
to its decisions.

[ 24 ]

(3.) Money to expend in giving effect to these and
in experiments, &c.

The Department of Revenue, &c., has nevey- had any
one of these three requisites at its command.

The only person connected with it from first to last
who has possessed any knowledge of both the theory
and practice of agriculture has been the Secretary, who
has had always from eight to ten hours a day (and
often much more) office work, and who for ten years
has barely seen a field, except from the train, on the
occasion of the half-yearly migration of the Govern-
ment of India between Simla and Calcutta.

It has never had any agency, though the creation
of a Directorship of Agriculture in the North- Western
Provinces in recent years has at last originated a
nucleus in 07ie province out of which such an agency
will, it is to be hoped, develop. Last, but not least,
it has had no money.

How it comes that the Government should have no
money to spend on improving the one branch of in-
dustry to which it chiefly owes its revenue, will be
briefly discussed further on. At present it is sufficient
to say that it had not the money to give. There was
no illiberality. Without a fundamental alteration in
its entire policy, no Government, situated as ours has
been, could have given for agricultural reform any-
thing that would have been of material use.

Constituted therefore and carried on under these
conditions, no one possessing any real insight into
what is required could ever have expected from this
Department any very tangible results in the way of
agricultural reform.

[ 25 ]

Its possible sphere of action in this direction was
limited to a degree that rendered almost nugatory any
efforts it might make.

Still it never abandoned the tradition of what its
ultimate object was intended to be. What little did
fall within its reach it dealt with in the best fashion
that its means and appliances permitted.

But what little it may have done (and of this a
brief account will be found in the appendix, note B.)
is to what is requisite, if any tangible results are to
be secured within any reasonable period, as the scratch-
ings of sparrows* feet to deep ploughing.

And the soil we have to deal with is the stiffest of
clay : an indigenous agriculture, that no frost of our
disapproval will disintegrate; self-coherent from the
intermixture of the traditions and superstitions, almost
a religion in themselves, of innumerable past ages.

If this Department has succeeded in some solitary
instance in doing a minute amount of good in such
matters, it is much as though a grain falling by chance
into the little bird's tracts, and favoured by unusual
fortune, gave rise to a solitary plant boasting some
few good ears, and bears to what it ought to have ac-
complished had it been properly constituted much the
same proportion that those straggling ears do to the
massive yield of some adjacent well-ploughed field.

What that proper constitution would have been
may, perhaps, be gathered by looking back to what
Lord Mayo first contemplated ; to what he would have
carried out had the decision rested entirely with him.

Lord Mayo's original conception of this Department
was as a purely agricultural bureau, presided over im-

[ 26 ]

mediately by a Director-Greneral of Agriculture and
not by a Secretary. He considered the subject too
great to admit of its being satisfactorily dealt with,
unless the best man available gave it his entire time
and thoughts. He intended the Director- General to
be supreme in his own Department, and only nominally
attached for official purposes to one or other Secreta-
riat, in the same way as the Director-General of Post
Offices is practically supreme in all departmental
matters, though nominally attached to the Financial
Department.

The Director-General was to have immediately under
him a small staff of experts, and was to keep up only
just such an office as was absolutely unavoidable.
There was to be as little writing and as much actual
work as possible. Directors of Agriculture were to
be appointed in each province, also to be aided by ex-
perts. They were to work partly through the direct
agency of farms* and agricultural schools, and partly
through the revenue officials of all grades down to the
village accountants. The Director- General was to be

* By farms are to be liere -understood real model farms on care-
fully selected sites, presided over by picked experts, and liberally
supjplied with funds and all requisite appurtenances. No plots of
waste, sucb as of late years have almost universally done duty as
model farms, waste brought roughly under cultivation by amateurs
or florists, who never enjoyed a single day's real training in either
theoretical or practical agriculture, and never had at their com-
mand more than a fraction of the funds requisite, if justice was to
be done to their charges. That these gentlemen and their so-
called farms were unsuccessful was surely their misfortune, not
their fault, and they deserve, most of them, much credit for doing
their best. But let no one gauge the capacity for good, in solving
agricultural problems and in imparting agricultural knowledge, of
well organized model farms by these failures.

[ 27 ]

moving about generally whilst tlie crops were on the
ground. He was to confer personally with all the Pro-
vincial Directors and their Governments, go thoroughly
with the aid of his staff into all their projects and
schemes, make himself fully acquainted with local
wants and wishes, and then during the hot season join
the Government of India, and lay before it as suc-
cinctly as possible all that was desired with his (and
his experts') opinions and recommendations. He was
to watch closely all the schemes and experiments car-
ried out by the Provincial Directors, to furnish them
with suggestions, information, and advice ; to procure
for them, if they wished it, chiefly through the Agri-
cultural Societies of Europe and America, any infor-
mation, seeds, cattle, sheep, models of implements, &c.,
that they required ; to keep all fully informed through
the medium of his journal of what all the rest were
doing; and as his experience and practical knowledge
increased, and alternate failures and successes gra-
dually indicated these, to lay down the broad lines of
the general policy in regard to agricultural matters that
the Government should pursue.

In connection with the Provincial Directors were to
be model and experimental farms, which were to be
at the same time agricultural schools of one grade or
another, some of the farms being more specially de-
voted to the improvement of seed by selection, others
to the introduction and acclimatisation of exotic
staples, others to the trial of implements and mecha-
nical appliances, others to stock-breeding, others to
the purposes of tuition, and so on. Mechanical engi-
neers were to be employed in connection with some of

[ 28 ]

these farms and schools, whose special duty it was to
be to adapt the results (where implements of all
kinds were concerned) of European and American
science, to the wants and means of the Indian hus-
bandman. At first the best civil officers available
were to be picked out as Directors, and the best avail-
able trained European agriculturists were to be got
out to direct the schools and farms, and act as advi-
sers to the Director- Greneral and Directors. Conti-
nuity was to be secured by making the service one ;
Directors were to be promoted to Director- General,
experts and heads of farms and schools were to be
promoted to Directorships. G-radually, as the expert
element acquired knowledge of the country, people,
and language, the non-expert element of civilians was
to be allowed to disappear. There was to be consti-
tuted a compact agricultural service in two divisions,
the lower and larger one recruited entirely from the
Indian schools, the smaller and higher division re-
cruited to a certain extent from the lower, but, at any
rate for many years, mainly from home.

Under the Director-General a Journal of Agricul-
ture was to be issued. A separate and competent
editor was to be employed, but the Director- General
was to be responsible, and he was to secure for it the
aid of all his own and all the Provincial Agricultural
Officers. The collection of agricultural statistics was
to be the work of the local Directors, but the further
tabulation of these statistics, and the preparation from
the provincial reports of a monthly or fortnightly
summary of the prospects and progress of the crops on
the model of those issued by the Bureau at Washing-

[ 29 ]

ton — then, I believe, a new thing — was to be done by
the Director- Greneral or his immediate subordinates.
The prices in Europe and elsewhere of important arti-
cles of Indian produce in which no trade already existed,
were to be carefully enquired into by the Director,
and published from time to time, and, if necessary, ex-
perimental shipment of articles in which a profitable
trade seemed probable, undertaken. As the scheme
developed itself, Government revenue oflBcials were to
be instructed to use their utmost endeavours to lead
the landholders of each district to constitute Agricul-
tural Associations ; they were to be urged and encou-
raged to send some of their relatives to the schools.
Exhibitions were to be held, prizes given, and every
effort made to give dignity in the eyes of the- natives
to the pursuit of agricultural science. But nothing
of this was to be attempted until some distinct suc-
cess had been achieved which could be pointed to as
proof that we had really something to teach, which it
would pay to learn.

There were a great many other details, but these
do not call for recapitulation here, even were this pos-
sible. The above sufficiently indicates the main out-
lines of Lord Mayo's original scheme.

All experience in other branches of the administra-
tion, in Forests, Post Offices, Telegraphs, Education,
Surveys, leads irresistibly to the conclusion that Lord
Mayo's first idea was the right one, and that until some
such distinct and thoroughly homogeneous organisa-
tion is here created for this express purpose, no very
perceptible or remunerative improvement in Indian
agriculture can be looked for.

[ 30 ]

But the present Secretary of this Department, at
that time residing with Lord Mayo, and with whom
he discussed all the details repeatedly, prepared an
estimate, the best he could then furnish, of the cost
of carrying out such a scheme, including Director-
General and seven Directors, and their staffs and
offices, and forty model farms, with schools or colleges
of one grade or another attached, contingencies and
plant, &c. &c., showing that the net expenditure when
the scheme was in full play would amount to nearly
25 lakhs of rupees (£250,000) a year, independent of
an initial, virtually unreproductive, outlay for offices
and buildings of possibly not less than 25 lakhs
(£250,000).

Lord Mayo, when convinced that this estimate
(avowedly tentative) was in the main not a grossly ex-
aggerated one, considered the whole thing as utterly
hopeless, and fixed his mind on carrying a much more
modest and admittedly imperfect scheme, to serve as
a beginning, a peg to which as time went on all else
could be by degrees appended. Even this idea was
greatly modified before the scheme was officially put
forth ; this, again, was met with perhaps the most
strenuous opposition any long-considered project of a
Viceroy, himself a practical expert in the particular
subject, ever encountered, and when at the last the
Department was created, it had lost every one of the
essential characters on which its possible success as a
Bureau of Agriculture was absolutely dependent. It
has done, it is hoped and believed, some good and use-
ful work in other branches, but as regards agriculture
it was and still remains virtually impotent.

[ 31 ]

That from the traditional and lon^-established Indian
administrative point of view, Lord Mayo was right in
considering the expenditure likely to be involved pro-
hibitive, no experienced Indian oflScial will deny. But
the question remains whether from the earliest period
of our rule our administration, as regards this most
important matter, has not been utterly and funda-
mentally wrong ; whether we have not systematically
ignored the gold at our door-steps, while we moved
heaven and earth to scrape together copper from all
quarters of the globe ; whether our present position,
as regards local agriculture, after so long a period of
rule, is not the very most conspicuous blot on our ad-
ministration ; and whether many of the more serious of
our internal troubles, past and present, debt, famine,
and discontent, have not been mainly and directly due
to the long-continued failure to realise what is alike our
duty and our interest, where agriculture is concerned.

Our mighty military expenditure has always been
(whatever people unacquainted with the country may
think) to a very great extent beyond our control.
The exigencies of our position, and the irrepressible
growth of our empire, have been such as to render
impracticable any great reduction in this item.

But in our civil expenditure, which really was within
control, we have, with the best of intentions, mis-
applied too large a share of the limited funds available.

We have gone on elaborating in every branch highly
organised systems of administration which were alike
beyond the wants and the wealth of our Indian
fellow-subjects.

So long as the masses of the population remained

[ 32 ]

as poor, and therefore necessarily as ignorant, as they
still are, all that was needed was a rough system of
patriarchal administration, a purified and somewhat
systematised reproduction of the native rule that we
replaced, a development of the then existing (now
unfortunately almost extinct) system of local self-
government by juries, and a rigid repression of all
crimes of violence. Under such a form of govern-
ment, and it has existed for a time in almost every
province we have acquired, the people have ever been
more contented and better satisfied with their lot than
under any of the more advanced and Europeanised
forms that have later always displaced it.

Had one-fourth only of what has been expended in
developing the existing elaborate and unpopular sys-
tem of civil administration been steadily and judi-
ciously employed in the improvement of agriculture,
had even only the same energy and the same funds
been devoted to this purpose, that have been devoted
to the cause of education, the people would now be
comparatively wealthy, famines would have been
greatly limited in area, and their pressure, even
within these narrowed limits, greatly lessened, and
there would have been no necessity for those un-
popular cesses, license taxes, and the like, which,
however inevitable, create equally inevitable discon-
tent, and the land revenue of the country, our main
source of income, would have stood at at least 30* per
cent, above its present level.

* If the produce were increased by 50 per cent., we could double
our land revenue, and yet leave all classes dependent on the land
better off than they are now.

[ 33 ]

Without undervaluing anything that has been done,
above all in the direction of education, it can scarcely
be denied that the first essential is to fill the stomachs
of the people, and that a certain degree of material
comfort, considerably in excess of what the masses of
the population now enjoy, must be attained before
any real necessity can exist for elaborate* systems of
civil administration. That we have spent our money
in these rather than in promoting what would have
simultaneously enriched the people and the Govern-
ment, in a degree that no other conceivable measure
could approach, must be held to have been a most
grievous error.

That with proper manuring and proper tillage,
every acre, broadly speaking, of land in the country
can be made to yield 30, 50, 70 per cent, (according

* In a recent debate (7tli May 1879) in the Imperial Legislative
Council, the Hon. Mr. Cockerell remarked: —

" For an elaborate Code of Procedure naturally not only pro-
moted an increase of litigation, but also tended in a still more
marked degree to enhance the time occupied in the disposal of
every contested suit. The Secretary to the Government of the
North-West Provinces, in a letter addressed to the Grovernment of
India relating to this measure, wrote : —

" ' Although /Sir George Couper has always been strongly in favour
of the non-regulation system, he must admit that, owing to various
causes, it is now out of date. It is enough to mention one fact;
and that is, the number of legal practitioners who practise in our
Courts. Formerly the parties appeared in person, and the Judge
had little difficulty in ascertaining the facts of the case. Now, in a
great number of suits, the parties are represented by barristers or
pleaders ; it is not only much more difficult to get at the bottom of
the case, but a great deal of time is tahen up by the arguments of the
lawyers ; and it is no exaggeration to say that a case which would
formerly have been disposed of in one hour now often occupies the
Court for two days.' "

3

[ 34 J

to circumstances) more of every kind of crop than it
at present produces, and this with a fully correspond-
ing increase in the profits of cultivation, is a patent fact
that the writer has proved with almost every common
North-Western Provinces' crop, that Mr. Eobertson
has proved with most of the Southern Indian staples,
that has been in fact established as well as any point
can be, until the masses prove it for themselves.

But — and this is the explanation of the apparent
apathy that has ever left our most important source
of revenue, the only one capable of very great de-
velopment, absolutely, if I may use the phrase, uncul-
tivated— the immense majority of officials in India
never have, and do not to this day in the least believe
it, while the very few who do realise it as an abstract
truth, stand aghast at the gigantic nature of the task
involved in securing the supply and use of this proper
manure and recourse to this proper tillage.

It is, however, just to pick to pieces a formidable
obstacle like this, that looms so portentous when
viewed from a distance and en masse, and to demolish
it in detail, that a special and skilled agency is re-
quired.

And, whatever the expense involved, it would seem
that, looking to the enormous magnitude of the mere
pecuniary interests at stake and the almost over-
whelming necessities that oppress us, we should, we
must, have that agency.

After all, a healthy equilibrium of the finances is a
primary condition of the well-being of the State. Can
anything be more gloomy than our financial jDrospects?
More money we must have ; much more as time goes

[ 35 ]

on ; look round on all possible sources of income
and say Lvhere there is any hope of such a material
increment as, in the face of an ever-falling exchange,
would relieve our anxieties on this score.

From the opium revenue, long threatened, but like
threatened men living long, we can at best expect no
permanent material increase. Insolvent as we are, an
Imperial policy demands the reduction of our customs
duties. Stamps and excise might each yield some
trifling increment, but the former at a greater cost,
perhaps, where the true interests of the people are
concerned, than it would be worth. Three or four
extra millions might be on a temporary emergency
extracted from salt, without much local . dissatisfac-
tion, but only in direct opposition to the policy which
the Grovernment have so earnestly avowed. Lastly,
by additional direct taxation, a couple or even three
millions extra might be raised, but not without creat-
ing the most widespread discontent that any accident
might develop into a costly outbreak or series of
outbreaks.

We have really only the land to look to, and here,
though we have for generations steadily refused to
see it, the gold lies thickly for the gathering.

It is one of those incomprehensible instances of de-
termined national blindness of which history records
too many similar examples, but it is a fact that, land-
lords of an estate, let on comparatively short leases,
with a gross rental of seventeen millions,* with the

* I exclude about four and a half millions, the revenue derived
from permanently settled and quit-rent estates.

3 *

[ 36 ]

full knowledge that the great mass of our land is
yielding less than two-thirds of what it should and
would if properly cultivated, we absolutely in prac-
tice refuse to take one single material step towards
remedying this lamentable waste of our property.

We spend millions on the minds and morals of our
fellow-subjects, but shrink, as if from a crime, from
spending a quarter of a million on what would bring
to each that full quota of daily food they need, and
which the masses now never enjoy for any twelve
consecutive months, and with this would relieve the
State of the existing all over-shadowing financial
incubus.*

Here, in improved agriculture, lies the one reason-
able hope of extricating ourselves from our difficul-
ties, and our present apparently almost hopeless
financial position offers the most irresistible argument
against further delay.

So long as things went fairly smooth with us, as we
could drift along after a fashion and pay our way, our
neglect of this great source of revenue might, looking
to the formidable difficulties which undoubtedly sur-
round the question, be only weak and foolish, but

* I need scarcely point out that it would not only be directly
as regards the food of the people and their land revenue that im-
proved agriculture would operate. Increased production would
involve an increase in exports, and pro tanto probably some dimi-
nution of the exchange burthen. It means an increase of imports,
and a relief to manufacturing interests at home, who then might
realise (hungry men can rarely stop to be rigidly honest about the
food they grasp) the true merits of their recent cry and leave us
the remnants of our customs. In a dozen ways, it would act and
re-act beneficially.

[ 37 ]

now, when herein appears to lie our sole hope of re-
newed prosperity, to hesitate longer would be criminal.

Unfortunately, while none will deny our necessities,
few, very few, are competent at this stage to realise
the certainty of the ultimate success of the proposed
remedy. Of those even who clearly admit the theo-
retic truth of the proposition, the vast majority will
at once recur to innumerable practical difficulties, and
if we are not prepared with immediate answers for
each, abandon the whole project as impracticable, for-
getting that it is just to sift these difficulties, to
gather the right facts in regard to, and bring a
scientific method of solution to bear upon them, that
we in the first instance require the powerful organisa-
tion suggested.

The best European experts, selected specially with
reference to the peculiar qualifications required for our
purposes here, and working hand in hand with the
ablest of our Indian Revenue and Irrigation Officers,
will unquestionably meet with difficulties at every step ;
but nothing is more certain than that all such difficul-
ties must disappear when attacked in a thoroughly
systematic and scientific method.

No matter how complicated and ill-conditioned the
knot, the patient tracing out of each string reveals
the point where the first advance may be successfully
made, and this done, the next and the next *' follow
fast and follow faster," till all that once seemed so
tangled becomes smooth and straight.

But this absolute certainty of ultimate success, of a
success yielding results beyond what the majority
would now even dare to hope for, is in no degree in-

[ 38 ]

compatible witli a full realisation of tlie difficulties
that do at present bar its attainment.

No magic transformation can be looked for. With
tlie most careful selections, the utmost energy and
good will on the part of all concerned, three or four
years must elapse before, with an organisation such as
is proposed, the men will have really settled down to
their work, and perhaps as many more before all the
most important problems, first demanding solution,
will have been clearly marked out. Even then it may
be only slowly that with silent fingers Science will
unpick the knots, and if as, without being in any de-
gree sanguine, we may fairly expect, after twenty
years' work, and after spendiug four or five mil-
lions, the main obstacles have been ' overcome, a
thorough reform effected in the agriculture of par-
ticular localities, and the people as a whole awakened
to what can be and has been done in this way, we
shall have made the best investment that ever landed
proprietor did.

It will be said that five millions is an enormous
sum. But then the return is certain ; it may be more
or less delayed, but it is the one investment that will,
we know, return cent, per cent, and more.

It is as though one were sinking a shaft to a bed of
coal, the depth, quality, and extent of which have
been ascertained. It may be far to sink, and some
very hard beds to cut through, and here tools break,
and there new tools have to be specially designed for
the particular work, and the water is troublesome, and
some of the beds very loose, and so on ; it may be a
little sooner or a little later, but we go on, neither

[ 39 ]

grudging time nor expense, because we are certain,
from our ascertained facts, that when we do get the
coal, it will repay us tenfold all we can have possibly
expended in reaching it.

It is not, however, as the sole practicable means of
materially increasing our revenues and ultimately re-
storing our finances to a healthy position that energetic
action in improving agriculture in India may be
insisted on.

On the contrary, not only is this necessary if we
desire any large increase of our land revenue, but it ih
equally so if we desire to avoid a material diminution
of this hereafter.

Notwithstanding the enormous additional areas
brought under cultivation, notwithstanding our vast
irrigation schemes, and our improved and really ad-
mirable systems of settlement, our land revenue
(excluding Burmah, still almost virgin soil, and making
allowances for annexations, such as those of Oudh,
the Punjab, &c.) has, if the rise of prices be taken
into account, remained stationary, if it has not actually
decreased. Yet the agricultural masses (there are
more of them, no doubt) are, to say the least, neither
wealthier nor better fed, taking the country as a whole,
than they were seventy years ago.

The sole explanation is, that the older tilled lands,
as a body, yield now lighter crops than they formerly
did.

This is what almost every experienced and intelligent
cultivator in Upper India will tell you is the fact in
regard to all but that little circle of fields skirting each
inhabited site, which gets the great bulk of what little

[ 40 ]

manure is available. This, too, miglit be gathered by
comparing what was reckoned in the '' Ain Akbari" as a
full yield for several descriptions of crops in the Agra,
Muttra, Mynpooree, and Etawah districts (in regard
to whicli the Emperor's information must have been
accurate), with the known yield in these same localities
at the present time.*

But it seems needless to dwell on arguments of this
nature, which are always liable to be directly traversed
by people who have no real knowledge of the question,
which from the complication of factors combining to
produce any crop, in any field, in any season, requires
not only a multitude of investigations, but their intel-
ligent manipulation by an expert to establish them
(and even then carry no conviction to the generality
of minds), when we can prove from the nature of
things that such must be the case.

Owing to a variety of causes, some of which may
be touched on in the next section, agriculture in India
has become, and becomes daily, more and more what
Liebig happily designated a system of spoliation.
Deep as the purse may have been, and rich as much
of our soil unquestionably was, it is clear that a time

* As the result of scores of careful personal experiments carried
out in the Allyghur, Mynpooree, and Etawah districts, the writer
would state fourteen bushels an acre of wheat to be a high average
for good fields, i.e. fields with which their cultivators are faii-ly
satisfied ; in other words, for the more successful fields, of the best
land, which alone is used for wheat. The " Ain Akbari" gives
nineteen bushels as an average yield in those days. I need not
say how far both these figures fall short of the yield of well-tilled
first-class lands, in East Norfolk for instance.

[ 41 J

must arrive wlien, by continually taking out a great
deal and putting back very little, both purse and soil
are exhausted.

Unlike the European peasant, the Indian husband-
man more or less fully realises the evils of this system ;
it is only on compulsion that he robs his mother soil,
and it is only in comparatively quite recent times that
this spoliation has acquired the alarming intensity that
now characterises it.

Only fifty years ago, when jungles and grazing
grounds abounded, when cattle were more numerous,
when much wood was available as fuel, there was
actually a much greater amount of manure available
and a very much smaller number of fields on which to
spread it.

The evil is a growing one, it is one of gigantic
magnitude, and though, like all great causes, it ope-
rates slowly, no one who has really watched agricul-
ture for years in this country can doubt that its effects
are already showing far and wide ; no one who under-
stands the question can doubt that they will develop
with most disastrously increasing virulence as years
run on.

Here, again, is a question in regard to which there
can be no doubt. How quickly or how slowly a per-
petually cropped and rarely, and then only scantily,
manured field will become thoroughly exhausted and
unculturable, depends, of course, on what we may
term the original capital of that field, and on the pro-
portion that may exist between the disbursements and
receipts, but it being admitted that the former are
and have been for years greatly in excess of the latter.

[ 42 ]

and that this disproportion is increasing, the ultimate
result is certain.

That the gradual (and perhaps later suddenly rapid)
deterioration of the major portion of our cultivated
lands is, unless a totally new system be inaugurated,
inevitably impending, can be denied by no one con-
versant with the subject.

It is impossible for Government to disbelieve this ;
they may think, and perhaps rightly, that it will last
their time, but they cannot doubt as to what they are
preparing for their successors.

And it is not as in other countries, where the land
is private property. It is its own land that Grovern-
ment is allowing to go to ruin, its own financial blood
that it lets run to waste. This is the sole goose that
ever would or could lay golden eggs for us, and we are
smiling as it is slowly starved before us, and will
not make a single effort worthy of the name to arrest
the catastrophe.

Yet again, from another and distinct source, ruin
and desolation, more palpable and speedy in its course,
though more limited in its operation, await vast tracts
in Northern India, unless the voice of reason can gain
a hearing and science be allowed to guide agriculture.

In Oudh, the Panjab, and the North- West Pro-
vinces, the soils mostly contain an appreciable admix-
ture of saline particles. With the construction of
high-level canals, the subsoil water level is raised, the
surface flooded, the earth yields up its soluble salts to
the water, which again restores them (but on the sur-
face) as it passes away in vapour. At first the result
may be good, and marvellous are the crops that have

[ 43 ]

been raised in tlie Doab on the first introduction of
canal irrigation, owing to the first slender doses of
potash and chloride of sodium.

But nature works on blindly and unceasingly. The
water below searches out one by one each soluble par-
ticle in excess of the particular soil's capacity of re-
tention, and, as it slowly creeps up by capillary
attraction, leaves these ever behind ib on the surface.

Time passes on, some crops begin to be unprofitable ;
in the hottest time of the year, a glimmer as though
of a hoar frost overspreads the land. The land grows
worse and worse, but ever night and day nature works
slowly on, and the time comes when, abandoned by
the cultivator, the land glitters white and waste as
though thickly strewn with crisp, new-fallen snow ;
never, alas ! to melt away, except under the rays of
science.

Along the little old Western Jumna Canal, thou-
sands of fields are to be seen thus sterilised. Along
the course of the mighty Ganges Canal — a work as it
were but of yesterday — the dreary wintry-looking
rime is already in many places creeping over the
soil.

Come it quickly or come it slowly, the ultimate
result here also is certain ; and, unless a radical
change is effected in existing arrangements, we know,
as definitely as we know that the sun will rise to-mor-
row, that the time must come when some of the richest
arable tracts in Northern India will have become
howling saline deserts.

The task, no doubt, looked at from a distance, seems
almost a hopeless one, but when it is more closely

[ 44 ]

examined, and when we fully realise tlie vast strength
of our revenue and irrigation establislinients tlirough-
out all those portions of the empire in which we have
the most direct interest in the progress of agriculture,*
it will be perceived that the plant for much of the
work is already on the ground, and that all that is
primarily necessary is an efficient directing and con-
trolling agency.

III.

Some of the problems that ivould at the outset engage
the attention of an Indian Bureau of Agriculture.

Assuming that now, at last., some real steps will be
taken in the direction of agricultural reform, it may
be useful to glance at some few of those problems
which should apparently at the outset engage the
attention of any working department of agriculture
in India, t

* In Lower Bengal no doubt these establishments are weak,
but then the land revenue is here permanently settled, and we
have not the same immediate pecuniary interest in the reform of
agriculture there.

t I have no doubt that many will be inclined to urge that
Agricultural education — a kind of education infinitely more needed
than the education in Law and Letters, now given at such a vast
cost in our Colleges and Universities — is one of the first things
to be undertaken, and that Agricultural manuals and text-books,
with object lessons in elementary schools, &c., are primary essen-
tials.

But this is not my view — these things, good as they are, belong
to a more advanced stage of progress.

At the outset, the Agricultural Department will have mainly to
teach itself. Scientific truths are immutable, but their profitable

[ 45 ]

First and foremost unquestionably stands the in-
creased provision of manure, not merely because tliis
is the crying want of Indian agriculture, but because
unavoidably any practicable arrangement for supplying
this want must at the same time supply many other
minor ones.

We may pass lightly over the first branch of this
subject, viz. the introduction of the Chinese system,
because though by the help of combined tact and
authority, kindness, patience, and gentle pressure, it
could even now be introduced, in two or three years,
into any small, well-supervised tract, and thence
spread gradually over the entire empire, every one
conversant with agricultural literature knows all about
it, and knows that it would in India need for its sup-
port legislation, and a happy combination of enthu-
siasm and discretion in working the law, that at the
present time is scarcely to be expected.

application demands a thorough knowledge of the entire environ-
ment of the particular position, a thorough comprehension of
local conditions, and we cannot usefully begin to teach natives
the theory of Agriculture until we have first taught ourselves (and
are, therefore, in a position to teach them also) how, under the
peculiar local conditions, of India and different provinces of
India, we can advantageously give practical effect to that theory.

I may add, though this is a distinct but germane question, that
I believe in teaching botany, vegetable physiology, chemistry, and
geology in schools, and practical farming on a farm ; I do not ad-
vocate mixing up the two. For the great mass a practical training
and the enforcement, as axiomatic rules of action, of certain defi-
nite maxims and precepts, is all-sufficient. To the few whose
capacities are of a higher order, or whom circumstances call to a
higher position, a thorough scientific education should be first
given, and then they should, in a distinct institution, be ini-
tiated in the full practice of what they have already mastered in
theory.

[ 46 ]

Undoubtedly the introduction of this system which,
while hugely benefiting agriculture, would perhaps do
more than any other conceivable measure to restrict
the ravages of cholera, should never be lost sight of.
Its importance cannot be over-rated, but the immediate
difficulties to be encountered, and the prejudices to be
overcome, are (or seem to be, for this may be partly a
chimera) so great that action in this direction may
reasonably be postponed while there is so much else
immediately practicable to be done.

Setting this aside, the main causes of the scarcity
of manure are the comparative paucity of cattle, and
the almost universal use of their dung as fuel.

The paucity of cattle is due almost entirely to the
incredible losses of stock sustained from starvation
and different forms of cattle disease. The consump-
tion of their droppings as fuel is due to the impossi-
bility, in some places, or expense, in others, of
procuring wood.

Over a great portion of the empire, the mass of the
cattle are starved for six weeks every year. The hot
winds roar, every green thing has disappeared, no hot-
weather forage is grown, the last year's fodder has
generally been consumed in keeping the well bullocks
on their legs during the irrigation of the spring crops,
and all the husbandman can do is just to keep his
poor brutes alive on the chopped leaves of the few
trees and shrubs he has access to, the roots of grass
and herbs that he digs out of the edges of fields, and
the like.

In good years he just succeeds ; in bad years, the
weakly ones die of starvation. But then come the

[ 47 ]

rains. "Within the week, as though by magic, the
burning sands are carpeted with rank luscious her-
bage, the cattle will eat and over-eat, and millions die
of one form or other of cattle disease, springing out
of this starvation, followed by sudden repletion with
rank, juicy, immature herbage.

Many years ago, the writer, when advocating the
establishment of Veterinary Colleges,* estimated the

* I quote from the memorandum on this subject which I sub-
mitted to Government : —

" According to censuses taken in tlie Punjab, Central Provinces,
&c., there is at ]3resent in India about one head of horned cattle
to every two human beings. This would give us about 100 mil-
lions of cattle, worth at the very lowest calculation dS75,000,000."

" It is not too much to say that one-half the whole capitalised
wealth of ninety-nine hundredths of the whole population of
India is to be found in their cattle ; it is not too much, I be-
lieve, to assume that the value of this cattle falls little, if at all,
short of 75 millions sterling. Hitherto diseases of the most
virulent character have raged amidst agricultural stock unchecked,
and almost unknown to and uncared for by the Government.
Periodically, plagues and murrains have devastated vast districts,
sweeping away the hard-earned savings of millions, and not only
depriving them of the means of subsistence, but seriously endan-
gering the food supply of the empire. Are we to accept such
calamitous visitations as dispensations of Providence to be ac-
quiesced in humbly, and submitted to as inevitable ? The spirit
of the present age will permit no such passive submission. Mis-
fortune and disease will and must come ; but whether in the case
of man or beast, it is for intelligent rulers to struggle against the
calamity, and circumscribe, by every effort that science can sug-
gest, the limits of its action. Everything must have a commence-
ment. Sanitation of human beings has been set on foot, and we
have now that of their humble but indispensable servants to care
for. I expect no great success at first. I look for no immediately
valuable results. The best trees take longest to grow. All I ask
is to be allowed to plant the seed ; and I submit that, having re-
gard to the circumstances of the country, it is no unreasonable

[ 48 ]

average annual loss of cattle in India by preventible
cattle disease of one form and another, at fullj ten
million beasts, rouglilj valued at £7,500,000, and
subsequent experience and enquiry lias led him to be-
lieve that this estimate materially understated the
case.

The Indian climates, varying as these do, appear
to be specially favourable to cattle. Every one who
has kept cattle here knows that if moderately fed, and
given plenty of work and kept away from contagion,
they never seem to be sick or sorry, but work on,
hardy and healthy, from youth to extreme old age.
They are very prolific too. If our poor beasts only
had reasonably fair play, the whole empire would
swarm with cattle, and cattle able to work the heaviest
ploughs, and, in soils and situations where this was
necessary or desirable, to plough as deep as you
like.

request to urge a grant of =£1,000, and a yearly allowance (for the
present) of about half that sum, to secure the establishment of
an institution, which, if a success, will pave the way to an efficient
system for bringing cattle epidemics by degrees more and more
under control, and for introducing throughout the Bengal Presi-
dency improved methods of dealing with stock, both in health and
in disease."

This project received Lord Mayo' s warmest support; it was, in
fact, his own idea worked out by the writer. Before the design
could be carried out he was taken from us. His successor pro-
mised support. The principal of the first College was nominated,
the premises even were taken, and the necessary alterations in
them commenced, when the then Viceroy changed his mind,
started oft: the Principal, Mr. J. B. Hallen (the only man then
in India who could have successfully inaugurated this impor-
tant work) elsewhere, and " concluded " the project. Ex uno
disce omnesl

[ 49 ]

But what can be expected under existing condi-
tions ? Annually a rigid Lent, too often merging into
actual starvation, followed by a sudden gorging with
unwholesome food. The people are keenly alive to
the dangers of such alternations, and labour hard to
prevent the latter, or they would not keep a single
head alive ; but despite all their care, their losses are
enormous. In bad years, whole provinces are devas-
tated. But a few years ago more than half the cattle
in Oudh were lost during two successive bad seasons.

And be it noted that it is not only the supply of
manure that this fearful mortality amongst the cattle,
and their resulting paucity, so greatly restricts ; it is
the little hoarded capital of the peasant, the very main-
spring of agriculture in India, that is thus flung away.
There is nothing new in all this ; everybody in India,
Government and people, all know it, after a fashion,
but beyond putting a single veterinary surgeon in a
couple of provinces to try and train a score of native
cow doctors, nothing is done. Nothing ever will be
done until there is a special and properly organised
department, whose sole business it is to look after it.

Some are cautious : " We must begin gradually,"
say they; " Rome was not built in a day," &c. Every
one knows these nauseating commonplaces by rote.

Well and good, they make their infinitesimally
minute beginning, but the moment you desire to go
on, there is the cry of expense, "We cannot afford it."

The policy of the Government of India in these
matters for the last twenty-five years can only be
likened to that of some nobleman, who, with his mag-
nificent palace slowly burning beneath his gaze, first,

4

[ 50 ]

after mucli hesitation, allows you to hire a boy with
a penny squirt, as a beginning, to prove that water
can extinguish fire, and then, this simple fact esta-
blished, directly you urge the hire of a powerful steam
fire-engine to take up the work of extinction in earnest,
shudders at the expense and will hear nothing further
on the subject.

But to return : Prevention is better than cure, and
desirable, nay essential, as it will become later to dis-
seminate correct veterinary knowledge amongst Indian
agriculturists, and place sound advice on all matters
connected with the treatment of cattle in health as
well as in disease, within every villager's reach, the
first thing clearly is to attack the root of the evil and
to mitigate the intensity of those causes to which
three-fourths of the mortality anaongst Indian cattle
are primarily due.

It is the hot-weather privations that have first to be
dealt with.

Now, no doubt, it may seem easy to deal with this.
European agriculturists will say, " What simpler ?
Grow sorgho, Guinea grass, &c. &c.," and probably
twenty years hence, when the Agricultural Department
gets a real hold upon the country and the people, and
other changes to be hereafter foreshadowed have come
about, this ivill be done to a certain extent. But at
present the condition of the people is such that it is
doubtful whether even the most stringent legislation,
worked by the most energetic executive, would secure
any such general growth of hot-weather forage as
would, taking the country as a whole, materially
ameliorate the miserable lot of our cattle.

[ 51 ]

Fairly good land, and a great deal of it, would be
wanted, and the people can't spare this ; and irriga-
tion is essential, and this is not at all generally avail-
able during the hot weather ; and a certain amount of
capital would be required, and the people have it not ;
and the money-lenders would not advance it for a
crop of which the greater part was not to come to
them direct, and it is altogether a new thing, such as
neither they nor their fore-fathers ever heard of ; and,
though in particular localities it might from the very
outset be pressed, and perhaps successfully, on some
few of the people, it must be many many years before
there can be the smallest chance of its general adop-
tion.

But there is one thing that can be done^^a thing
that is entirely in accord with the traditions of the
country — a thing that the people would understand,
appreciate, and, with a little judicious pressure, co-
operate in, and that is the planting up with trees of a
certain sufficient area in every village in the drier por-
tions of the country.

The undertaking is a very large one, but presents
no insuperable difficulties ; it is a gigantic hill to cut
away, but it is all earth and no rock, its greatness is
purely numerical. There are an immense number of
spadesful to be lifted, but the lifting each is per-
fectly easy. Energy, perseverance, and time are all
that is necessary. Once a sufficient area planted in
each neighbourhood as a communal forest, and the
cattle difficulty is at an end ; the forest would be
closed till other fodder was consumed and the fields
were bare, and then they would be opened to the vil-

4 *

[ 52 ]

lage herds. In India, wherever you have a closed
grove of trees, there spontaneously you have a luxu-
riant growth of herbage, and at the end of April, even
in the hottest and driest parts of Upper India, where
the whole country round is as bare as any desert, you
will find in preserved groves (such as the more wealthy
zemindars often keep for their own cattle and in view
to the sale of the grass in neighbouring towns) a mass
of hay above and green grass below, that is perfectly
astounding.

This is due partly to the rich humus, the result of
the decay for many years of fallen twigs and leaves,
and partly to the diminished evaporation from the soil
protected by the trees.

But with this improved provision of fodder we
obtain simultaneously an improved supply of fuel, and
an immediate great diminution in the consumption of
manure as such. Very few natives will cook with cow-
dung cakes if they can procure sticks, and it is chiefly
for cooking^' purposes that fuel is required in India.
Moreover, in the wood ashes we have a new useful
source of manure.

Two main questions would have to be considered : —
First, how the land is to be obtained ; second, how it
is to be planted.

For the first, legislation would be required. Re-
course to the Act would not be necessary in all cases ;

* Doubtless chiefly for cooking, but there is a vast consumption
in brick-making, and here the P. W. B. are great sinners. The
increase of brick-making, and with it, the consumption of dung
as fuel (it being, in most places, cheaper than wood), has been
enormous of late years.

[ £3 ]

a great deal could be done by the influence of the
local officials, but the power to act with or without
consent must be taken.

In some places, Glovernment has plenty of land of
its own which it could plant up, but this is almost
exclusively in thinly populated and imperfectly settled
tracts where no special action is required. Generally
throughout those portions of the empire where this
planting up is most urgently required, the Government
has little or no land in its own exclusive possession.
It is a sleeping partner in all the land, but it has
made the management over to landholders of one
class or another, whom it has taken in as working
partners, on condition of receiving certain yearly pay-
ments, supposed to be equivalent to half the average
profits. Such payments are fixed for longer or
shorter periods, and are liable to alteration at the
close of these at the pleasure of the Government.

In almost every village, larger or smaller tracts of
land are to be found quite good enough for planting
up with hardy trees, but yet too poor to be worth
cultivating ; while besides these there are often con-
siderable tracts of land, which, though culturable, are
never cultivated, and bring in nothing to the land-
holder. Legal authority would be required to set
apart portions or the whole* of such lands as com-

* Under any circumstances, as this land serves, after a fashion,
as a grazing ground, it could rarely be talcen up at once as a
whole. Part would be first planted, and five or six years later,
when the trees in that part were sufficiently large to allow of
the admission of cattle, another part would be taken up, and
so on.

[ 54 ]

munal forests, without any compensation to tlie land-
holder, unless it appeared that he derived any revenue
therefrom, and that in consequence of the action thus
taken, his receipts from his estate (technically called
the " assets ") were reduced below twice the Grovern-
ment rent, or as we call it, revenue.

In nine cases out of ten no compensation would be
required, and certainly at first I would only attempt
to deal with the nine cases and leave the tenth, in
which compensation would be necessary, to stand over
till the people had fully realised the enormous advan-
tages of the scheme.

At the first glance it may be thought that what is
proposed would involve a serious and indefensible in-
terference with the rights of private property. It
may be said : " True, these landholders are not abso-
lute proprietors in the sense that we understand the
word in England ; their tenures are more like copy-
holds, subject to periodical enhancement of rents at
the will and pleasure of the real proprietor, the State,
but still they have a certain proprietary right, which
they can in most places sell and mortgage and be-
queath, a right to continue to hold the land undis-
turbed, so long as they continue to pay the demand
which the State from time to time assesses on it."

Clearly we could not take any thing that directly
helps them to pay this assessment, without a corre-
sponding diminution in this latter ; but our primary
condition is, that we shall grant this, where this is
equitably required, and that we shall at first confine
our action to lands which are at present bringing in
Qothing. And we are not going to take these lands

[ 55 ]

away, nor are we going to derive any direct benefit
from them. We are going to convert land, now
valueless, into land which will directly and indirectly
enrich alike landholder and cultivators ; we, in fact,
only re-assume control over certain lands (in which,
be it remembered, we are partners) because their util-
isation in the manner demanded by our interests, the
landholders' interests, and the interests of the entire
nation, requires an organisation and intelligence that
our managing partners cannot command and do not
possess.

Looking to all that depends upon the measure,
looking to the impossibility of carrying it out with-
out State interference, I do not think that the most
ardent advocate for non-interference with private
rights would deny that here was a case in which it
was not only justifiable, but incumbent, on the State
to interfere.

I do not go further into details ; every one's ideas
on such a subject must be crude until we actually
begin to carry out the work in practice. It is to
elaborate the practical details of procedure here as
in other matters that we require a special organisa-
tion.

The land available, it will be necessary to surround
it with a good stout mud^ fence, such as the people
now construct around any grove they plant, and the
ground inside must be more or less ploughed or
broken up, and if the soil be such as to warrant the
planting of fruit-trees, such as mangoes, some sort of
a well may have to be dug.

I do not hesitate to say that all this the villagers

[ 56 ]

should be required to do, and that power should be
taken to order this, and to punish by some trivial fine
disobedience of such orders.

This power existing in the background, no compe-
tent revenue officer would find the least difficulty in
getting all that was necessary done with the entire
good will of the people, and at really no cost to them
or the State. There are several periods in the year
when every cultivator can give half a day's labour
daily at no loss to himself, and when, if not helping
at the communal enclosure, he would be idling.

And there are no people in the world that can be
more easily led by an intelligent superior into combin-
ing to carry out a single work (the benefit of which
they understand) under his eye ; a few turbans given
away and a few sweetmeats would convert the entire
business into a sort of festival. Here once let it be
clearly understood that the enclosure would be pre-
served during the cold season, and (after the first five
years) thrown open to cattle in the hot season, and
every man will appreciate and approve them.

In Mhairwarra, for forest purposes. Government
took up large reserves. The measure, though neces-
sary, was a very unpopular one. Last year when the
country suffered from drought, and the starvation of
their cattle stared the people in the face, these re-
serves were thrown open to them. Forest conservancy
was a little thrown back, but the people are no longer
opposed to it; on the contrary, they quite appre-
ciate it.

As to lohat should be planted, hardy indigenous
trees merely for shade, trees furnishing fruits for

[ 57 ]

men or cattle, in what localities and in what propor-
tions— these are points to be worked out gradually by
the Department.

Again, rules will be required to regulate the use and
prevent the abuse of these communal forests or groves.
A system of management will have to be elaborated,
the leading idea of which must be to induce the people
to act to the greatest possible extent for themselves.
A dozen other details will have to be dealt with, but
there is not one single difficulty to be encountered of
which we shall not be able to say solvitur eundo.

I am quite sure that, looking at the work sketched
out, many able and experienced officers will say at
first, "It is too vast, it cannot be done." But these
same officers would not deny that they could, if
vested with the powers above contemplated, make all
necessary arrangements and carry out the scheme in,
say, a dozen villages. Nor, again, that having done
this, they could repeat the operation more readily in
another group of hamlets ; nor that when thus far
advanced, their senior native revenue officers could
carry on the work on the same lines in many villages,
though some would still require their personal inter-
vention to overcome difficulties. Nor would they
deny that one pergunnah completed, the neighbour-
ing ones would be much more easily dealt with, and
so on. The truth is the fagot, taken in the lump, is
rather alarming, but the sticks are all very little,
and you have only to pick the fagot to pieces, to
make the task a very easy, although a tedious and
lengthy, one.

Of course works like these are not to be commenced

r 58 1

broadcast or at random. The work would be begun
in specially selected localities, and the greatest avail-
able strength turned on to these from Revenue, Irri-
gation, Forest, and Agricultural Departments ; and
you would begin prudently, not forcing the measure
down any one's throat, but talking about it to every-
one, and having public meetings (and very effective
these are in the interior of districts if you manage
properly) and devoting special endeavours to con-
vincing men who, you know, carry weight locally,
and letting it leak out that there will be turbans and
dresses of honour for people who materially aid the
progress of the scheme, and just possibly a C.S.I, or
CLE. for any one who carried a large tract of
country, and so on. Every one who has carried a
new great measure through a district, such as the
voluntary 1 per cent, subscription to schools was in
the old days, knows all about it, and knows that any
harmless and beneficial measure, not opposed to the
religious opinions of the people, can be carried by
patience, perseverance, and tact, if only it be known
that the Government approves, and really wishes, and
sooner or later intends, to have it carried.

It may here be noticed that this extensive reboise-
ment, while operating to augment materially the
manure supply, to improve the breed and increase
the supply of cattle and economise the agricultural
capital of the country, cannot fail to exercise a power-
ful check over the ravages of famine.

How far the increase of trees in level country ope-
rates (if at all) to increase the rainfall, is still an open
question ; but that a tract thickly studded with forests

[ 59 ]

and groves retains the water it receives a great deal
longer than one devoid of these, is a matter of every-
day experience ; and it is certain that widespread and
entire failure of crops over enormous areas, such as
we have witnessed so often in the last quarter of a
century, would have been impossible had cultivation
and forest been interlaced throughout them as has
been above proposed. There would, no doubt, have
been some total failure, and much partial failure, but
the intensity of the calamity would, beyond all ques-
tion, have been much mitigated, and it is quite an
open question whether, in some cases, it would not
have been altogether averted.

Moreover, it is fair to presume that a considerable
proportion of the trees planted will be fruit-trees, the
mango for instance, which always fruits most heavily
in seasons of drought, and which furnishes a very
important, and not unwholesome, supply of food to the
people, at the most critical period of years of scarcity.

The enormous increase in the supply of such food
that the proposed measure involves would most mate-
rially assist the people in tiding over bad seasons on
greatly diminished rations of grain.

And in famines, the death of the cattle is almost as
disastrous to the State, from a mere utilitarian point
of view, as the death of the men, and for the cattle
our forests will provide. The cattle will never starve
with these wide plantations everywhere, as there are
scores of indigenous trees whose foliage furnishes
fairly nutritious fodder, and in seasons of great
drought the people would be allowed to make the
utmost of every leaf.

[ 60 ]

In many of the tracts where famine has raged, a
thorough reboisement, with improvement in cattle,
and an abundant supply of manure would admit of
deep ploughing, such that, with a large portion of the
surface protected by trees, no total failure of the crops
could result from the failure of a single monsoon.

It is needless, however, to pursue the subject into
all its details ; my object merely is to convey some
general conception of the scheme which, the more it
is considered, the more pregnant it will prove of direct
and indirect benefits to agriculture in India.

Although all that has been urged in regard to whole-
sale reboisement is applicable to, perhaps, the major
portion of the temporarily settled districts, no one
rule holds good, and no one scheme can suffice for the
whole of this vast empire. There are regions as large
as the British Isles, where no reboisement is requisite,
and where altogether different arrangements in regard
to supply of manure are needed, where we have chiefly
to teach the people more care in collecting it, more
care in storing it, resort to available mineral manures,
of the value of which they have little or no conception,
and the like.

Again, farm-yard manure, though I have laid so
much stress on it, as it really contains everything that
we take out of the land, is not the only organic manure
readily available to which the Agricultural Department
will have to direct attention. Outside each village is
a golgotha, where the bones of all cattle and animals
that die whiten and slowly decay in ghastly piles. At
present this enormous supply of phosphates is abso-
lutely wasted. Heally portable bone-crushers, that

[ 61 ]

could move easily over the sandy village tracks, will
have to be devised. These will have to be sent round
from village to village, crushing for each community
their, at present, useless heaps. The people will have
to be taught how, when, in what doses, and for what
crops, to administer this powerful fertiliser, and how
to increase the rapidity of its action by treating it
with sulphuric acid, which latter will have to be loaned
to them as an advance.

There are districts where it will probably be found
necessary to manufacture manures outright, and
advance them to the cultivators, as any other advance
is made, until, their pecuniary value established and a
permanent demand created, private enterprise steps

in to supply it. . * . .

And of course careful analyses of soils (which in
India are wonderfully homogeneous over wide areas)
would be necessary to indicate with precision the
nature of the plant food more especially wanting in
each case, whether with reference to a particular soil
or a particular crop ; but these are among the neces-
sities of scientific agriculture everywhere; there is
nothing in regard to them peculiar to India; and,
with many other similar matters, they need no special
notice here.

Although with diminished mortality and improved
condition of cattle, the agricultural capital of the
country will be, as time runs on, notably increased, it
would be idle to suppose that the generally im-
poverished condition of the actual cultivators of the

[62]

soil, almost throughout the empire, will need no other
or direct relief.

Wherever we turn we find agriculturists burdened
with debts running on at enormous rates of interest.
In some districts, even provinces, the evil is all-
absorbing — a whole population of paupers, hopelessly
meshed in the webs of usurers.

No one probably needs to be told that no farmer or
cultivator, hopelessly in debt, can ever do any justice
to himself or his land.

If only on account of our own direct and vital in-
terest in the land, some action is necessary on our
parts to limit the progress of and gradually wholly
eradicate this plague of indebtedness ; certainly next
to the manure question, there is no other that will
earlier demand the attention of the Agricultural De-
partment.

The subject is so large and complicated, its difficul-
ties so protean, and the remedies required necessarily
so liable to vary in relation to each of the almost
innumerable combinations of circumstances under
which the evil will have to be dealt with, that it is im-
possible to discuss it at all exhaustively in a sketch
like this. Still some indication may be given of the
manner in which this indebtedness has come about
and of the direction in which a remedy for it should
be sought.

A theory is at times gravely maintained, even in
India, that the ryot is a thriftless, reckless fellow ; that
no matter what he gets, he will always spend more
than his income ; that it matters nothing whether the
rent he has to pay is high or low ; that he rather likes

[ 63 ]

than otherwise having a balance against him at his
banker's ; and that do what one will, he will always
be in debt.

Nothing can convey a more thoroughly and utterly
false conception of our agriculturists as a body.

That these, in common with the entire population,
high and low, do, in accordance with immemorial
custom,* spend a great deal more upon marriages than
according to English ideas any similarly circumstanced
sane man ought to or would, may be at once ad-
mitted.

Any real, vigorous, and persistent actionf to check
this common form of extravagance, taken under sound
native advice, would be a real blessing to the country.
But, after all, this is the poor fellow's onjy extrava-
gance ; these are almost the only white days in his
dull-coloured life of toil and pinching, and unless he is
singularly blessed (or unblest ?) there are not many of
them, and for the rest, a more careful frugal being is
not to be found on earth.

He hates debt ; he hates the usurer's name ; let
any stroke of luck befal him, and see how soon the
monstrous account against him is settled. This is not
the case merely with individuals, the population of

* In most parts of India custom is still, be it remembered, where
social matters are concerned, an iron, all-embracing, law.

t Hitherto, as in most other matters in India, there has been a
vast amount of "cry," and the smallest possible amount of "wool."
Every now and then the question crops up, a great deal of talk
ensues, nothing effective is done, and the matter drops.

[ 64 J

whole provinces (like Guzerat and Berar, owing to the
abnormal profits from cotton during the American
war) have similarly cleared themselves.

Fools are scarce nowhere, but only show our ryots
how to free themselves from the toils of the money-
lender and how to keep out of his books, and none
need fear that the great mass of them will long remain
plunged in their present comparative misery; for
misery of a kind it is.

A very happy natured, contented race, as a whole,
are our village husbandmen, and they have their little
amusements and festivals, and when harvests are very
good, pretty much all that, with their simple habits,
they need. The picture is not all black, or how could
we or any one hold the country ? But withal their
lives are very hard and toilsome, and through it all too
many are pressed with debt. Good crops ease the pain
a little, and the village merry-making brings a tem-
porary forge tfulness, but the sore is always there, and
except in very good seasons multitudes for months in
every year cannot get sufl&cient food for themselves
and their families. They are not starving, but they
are hungry, they get less than they want and than
they ought to have.

ISTo doubt they make the best of it, and keep cheer-
ful under pressure that would crush men of more
advanced races, but this very child-like nature involves
dangers, and we may see from the Deccan riots and
sporadic cases occurring constantly everywhere, that
quite independent of the necessities of agricultural
reform, and quite apart from the duty of ameliorating
a lot on the whole so unenviable, cogent political reasons

[ 65 J

exist for grappling with this growing evil of indebted-
ness.

Much has been said about tenures in connection
with this matter, and many have ascribed the origin
of the present depressed condition of the peasantry
to mistakes perpetrated in regard to these.

No doubt many errors have been here committed,
and no doubt, other things being as they are, these
have powerfully contributed to bring about the present
lamentable state of affairs. But the root of the evil
is not here, and but for other and utterly distinct mis-
takes, these errors, though involving in some cases
injustice or hardship to individuals, would have
brought about no general indebtedness of the agricul-
tural classes.

It has already been remarked that we have wasted
on an elaborate, cumbrous, and unsuitable system of
civil jurisprudence, money that ought to have been
employed in improving our agriculture and increasing
the material comforts of the masses ; it may now be
added that the system on which it was expended has
been the chief and direct cause of the major portion
of the indebtedness and impoverishment of our agricul-
turists.

Errors as to tenures ; forcing proprietary rights
upon people incapable of appreciating or understand-
ing them ; forcing upon districts where one system
of landholding was indigenous a wholly different,
exotic, and therefore unsuitable one; the want of
elasticity in our system of realising the revenue ; un-
limited subdivision of holdings, and a dozen other
causes, may be indicated as having, our courts being as

5

[ 66 ]

they are, contributed to it, but these courts themselves
are the fans et origo of the evil, and had they been
the simple summary courts of equity and not of law,
which was all the state of the country demanded, all
these other causes would have smouldered on almost
innocuously.

It is necessary to realise the radical changes tliat
our courts and revenue systems combined have wrought
in the position of our agriculturists.

Previous to our rule no private person had, broadly
speaking, any property in the soil.* All proprietary
right, in the sense in which we at home understand
the word, vested directly in the State or vicariously in
some powerful chief or official. All that the people
as a body enjoyed were a high class of occupancy
rights, heritable but not transferable.

A man might be ever so much in debt, but you could
not interfere with the land he held, for that was not
his, but his ruler's; and such rights as he possessed
therein were personal to himself and family, or, in
some cases, clan ; and if any outsider had obtained
possession, the State would have stepped in and resumed
the property. No doubt, if sufficiently bribed, the
local officials would, and often did, wink at transfers,
but these were opposed alike to custom and tradition
which then constituted the law, such as it was, on this
subject.

There was, therefore, in those days no great in-

* We must perhaps except lands given to Brahmins, saints,
&c. for temple, mosque, or other religious or charitable purposes ;
but even these were, properly speaking, inalienable.

[ 67 ]

ducement to money-lenders to advance money to land-
holders or cultivators of any degree, still less was it
their interest to tempt those to take money, which
they really did not want, in order to make an extra
display at a wedding or a durbar.

They lent money, but only at enormous rates of in-
terest ; but this was not unfair, as they never hoped
even to recover the principal, while for such interest
as they were to get (a widely different thing to what
was written in the bond) they were dependent on the
good will of their debtor, or the rare, paternal inter-
ference of some superior, who, appealed to with suit-
able presents, would say, '' Come, Rambuksh, you owe
the Sahoo Sahib a lot of money, and you have paid
him nothing for two years; you just satisfy him by
some proper payment on account, or it will not be well
for you."

And even such interference was rarely needed, for
the people are naturally very honest ; the creditor had
no object in cheating, because he could, as a rule,
only expect to get what he could convince his debtor
was justly due, while as for the debtor, though he had
no intention of paying off his creditor, whose debt
was perhaps six generations old, and who moreover
never expected this, still neither had he any objection
to make, from year to year, such payments on account
as he could afford and as according to custom (every-
thing was custom in those days) were fair and right.

It was a point of honour with him, and the natives
of India had a very keen sense of honour ; they saw
many things from a different point of view to what
we do, but they kept, I think, as a whole, closer to

6 *

[ 68 ]

their standard than we as a nation have ever kept to
ours.

It was almost a point of honour with them to de-
fraud the State, to make false statements to supe-
riors, &c., just as it used to be for boys to rob their
master's garden, and mislead him whenever possible ;
but it would have been as base in their eyes to cheat
or bilk their friend, the family banker, as it would have
been for the schoolboy to steal from one of his own
companions.

So there was debt in those days too, but it hurt
nobody ; the banker got his annuity so long as things
went well, and even if in bad times he got little or
nothing, he knew that there were always strong arms
and sharp swords, ready to defend him if things went
wrong with him ; each party was dependent more or
less on the good offices of the other, and so far from
being enemies they were friends, bound together by
the remembrance of many acts of mutual kindness,
and if by chance they could not agree, — and men,
though both honest and well meaning, will at times
fall out and differ, — they called in a party of respect-
able neighbours and friends (whose intervention only
cost a good dinner) who heard all both had to say,
effected a wise compromise, and settled the matter.
There was no appeal ; the brotherhood, or mixed jury,
as the case might be, had spoken and the matter was
at an end.

But with the enlightened rule of the British Grovern-
ment all this was to cease. Brimful of philanthropy, we
could not let well alone, or indeed believe that any-
thing could be well for others, which was not in ac-

[ 69 ]

cordance with what we thought good for ourselves.
With our innovations, our exotic systems of land and
law, we have dissolved the bonds of society, we have
turned peace into war, we have arrayed every class
against that on which it was most dependent, capital-
ists against landholders, landlords against tenants,
every man almost against his fellow.

There is not, I believe, a single wise and good native
of India who will not freely admit that, whatever the
failings and shortcomings of individual officers, the
motives and intentions of the British Grovernment,
where India is concerned, have, on the Avhole, been
pure and noble. But I fear that there is not one who
would not condemn, in terms stronger than I have the
heart to use, the cruel blunders into which our nar-
row-minded, though wholly benevolent, desire to re-
produce England in India has led us.

We began by conferring proprietary rights (the
poor people, no ownership in the soil, mere serfs !) or,
where as in Bombay we stopped short of this, we gave
additional strength to occupancy rights, and made
these transferable. Every one knows the European
arguments about enhancing the value of rights by
making them transferable. Such a great thing to
enable them to be brought into the market ! Buying
and selling, as a wise writer once said, is an English-
man's idea of Paradise, and in the most unselfish spirit
we desired to introduce our native fellow-subjects into
this same Paradise.

No one saw that the people were on the whole happy
and contented as they were, that their past sufferings,
where they had suffered, were due not to any defects

[ 70 ]

in their position or rights as established by custom,
but to those rights having been ignored, and that
custom having been over-ridden.

No one seems to have realised that the tenures of a
country are the outcome of its whole past history,
ever, as time rolled on, adjusting themselves to the
varying conditions and relations of the different
classes of the community. That they must necessarily,
therefore, be under the circumstances, those best suited
to the country ; that though they may require change
as these conditions and relations varv, it must be

" Change that broadens slowly down from precedent to
precedent,"

and that any sudden and arbitrary, externally imposed,
change must, however noble the impulse that prompted
it, involve new and necessarily unsuitable combina-
tions.

Human institutions to be healthy must grow where
they are to stand.

Not so reasoned our predecessors. They gave a new
value to the land, by rigidly limiting their demand on
the soil — a good thing, quite in accordance with the
people's ideas of what a good prince should do, — and
they conferred partial proprietary rights (which no one
wanted or appreciated) wholesale, and they made all
the rights they created or acknowledged in the soil
transferable.

Up to our time such rights as existed were entailed
in the strictest fashion ; creditors could not get hold
of the land, even during the lifetime of the debtor.

[ 71 ]

We raised the character of the rights, but cut off the
entail without the consent of the heirs.

At first this did no great harm. Nobody understood
the change, our people then were no lawyers, courts
were few, and administered simple justice according
to equity and good conscience, and the majority of
civil disputes continued to be settled by the people
amongst themselves in the old fashion.

But as times passed on new and new laws were con-
tinually made, and courts were multiplied and gra-
dually modified into courts of law, where justice sat
fettered by codes, and whence equity and good con-
science had been banished for contempt of court, and
a swarm of professional pleaders (good and bad, but
specially the latter) spread over the length and breadth
of the land, and village verdicts ceased to carry weight,
and in the simplest matter, which formerly would have
been settled on his own village platform by his own
brethren and elders, and rightly settled in an hour, a
man now had to put up with wrong, or walk twenty
miles to court, and fee pleaders, and waste a week or
more, and many weeks' earnings, and all as often as
not merely to see the wrong triumph. Or, if suc-
cessful, to be dragged yet another fifty miles, on appeal
to a higher court, where there were even more ex-
pensive pleaders to fee, and more time and money to
waste, dangling about the court-house steps or com-
pound, dogged by peons and emissaries of the under-
paid native subordinate ofi&cials, all threatening loss of
his case, unless he bribed, bribed, bribed. And if he,
— 0 fortunatus nimium, — gained his case here too, and
prepared to start for his neglected fields, a half-ruined

[ 72 ]

and yet partly happy man, (for natives acquire a pas-
sion for litigation, just as Europeans do for drink or
gambling,) lo and behold, a second or special appeal
on some miserable quibble of law, evolved out of clum-
sily drawn statutes, and he is dragged away yet another
one, two, or three hundred miles to the provincial
capital, where, after wasting months, and spending all
he had with him or could borrow in fees to lawyers
and bribes to hangers-on of the courts, he, as likely as
not, finally loses his case. Constituted as our civil
courts are, the chances on each hearing do not pre-
ponderate largely in favour of real justice being done.
What exactly the chances are of this happy event
occurring three successive times in one case, I leave
those, who make " the odds " their study, to calculate.
Winning or losing, he often returns utterly demo-
ralised to his home ; he has heard all the pleadings ;
quibbles and fictions on his side, quibbles and fictions
on the other side ; and he has listened to many other
cases besides his own, and has been impressed with the
fact that, on the whole, dishonesty is the best policy,
and henceforth this conviction shapes his dealings with
his banker and his neighbours. His banker on his
part is in no way behind his debtor ; indeed, having
necessarily more to do with the courts, he earlier, as
a rule, became a convert to the gospel of fraud ; and
the temptation to him was immense, for lands are
saleable now, and the impossible rates of old bonds
entered as a matter of form, when no one dreamt of
repaying capital, are now enforcible, and the principal
can be recovered too, and every landholder of every
degree can be sold up out of house and home.

L 73 ]

And perhaps our man is sold up, and tHe banker
buys his land, and takes possession, and then — now
and then the inherent love of his ancestral lands, his
strongest passion, is too strong for the poor homeless
wretch, and one evening in the dusk, when the unwary-
usurer, who has paid a visit to the village to see his
new purchase, is wending his way homewards, there is
a rush and the heavy thuds of a club, and the gallows
ends the tragedy which our blundering philanthropy
has so elaborately prepared.

And similarly, be it noticed, though it is a digres-
sion, that our laws and courts have set landlord against
tenants, and converted too many of both classes into
sad rogues. In the old days there was no talk of
tenants-at-will, and tenants with occupancy rights, and
so on. No doubt every landholder, where such really
existed, could evict any tenant he chose, and if a man
seduced his neighbour's wife (they were poor ignorant
creatures), or otherwise insulted or offended the com-
munity, evicted he was, but custom barred, and far
more effectively than any British law or court, any
arbitrary exercise of this power, and the landlord who
might any day have to defend his Penates against a
Maratha inroad, an imperial functionary, or a band of
dacoits, was obliged to keep good friends on the whole
with the mass of his cultivators, on whose strong arms
the safety of his property and the honour of his house
might, at any moment, become dependent.

Both classes here, again, were bound together by
ties of mutual obligation and inter-dependence, but
we, with our ill-starred mania for exact systems of
law, have dissolved the bonds, and have converted

[ 74 ]

into antagonists the two great classes on whose har-
monious co-operation not only their own welfare, but
in many parts of the country the progress of our land
revenue, so materially depends.

Let others write panegyrics on those who '' first
planted the seeds of a civilised system of jurisprudence
in India " : I, looking sadly now on the Upas tree that
has crowned their labours, can only say : —

Ille et nefasto te posuit die,
Quicunque primum, et sacrileg^ manu,
Produxit, arbos, in nepotum
Perniciem, ojpjprohriumque pagi !

No doubt it may startle some to propose that we
should in these respects retrace our steps, and, es-
chewing the highly seasoned and artistic messes of
civilisation, revert to the simple fruit and herbs of
our unenlightened predecessors.

But the case stands thus : — The country is on the
high road to bankruptcy : sudden and arbitrary reduc-
tions in all directions, not impossibly really wasting
more money than they seem to save, will of course
be resorted to, and a nominal equilibrium restored for
a while.

No such measures, however, can restore the finances
of a growing country to a healthy condition any more
than cutting off strips from the ends of the legs to let
in as gussets into the seat, is calculated to place the
trousers of the growing boy in a permanently satisfac-
tory condition.

He is bound to outgrow them, and the country is

[ 75 ]

bound to outgrow the existing revenue, snip and patch,
botch and tinker as you will.

The only source from which you can derive that
large increase of revenue which the empire must have
hereafter if it is to continue to flourish, or even exist,
is the land ; and from the land this increase is not
to be got so long as throughout wide provinces all
classes of agriculturists are crippled by poverty and
debt.

Some parts of the country are comparatively free
from this blight. No measures that we decide to take
need be universal in their application. In no two
provinces, probably, would the remedy take precisely
the same form, but broadly speaking, what is neces-
sary wherever this disease has gained much ground,
is to remove all cases connected with the money and
grain transactions of agriculturists as such * from the
cognisance of the regular courts, and secure the ad-
justment of all these by local tribunals.

Natives of known probity and fair intelligence (and
in every province there are thousands of these, igno-
rant enough of law, but thoroughly able to settle
fairly a money question between two other natives,
when they have the real facts before them), such
natives, we say, would be selected, many no doubt
from our huge revenue establishments, and sent as
judges, from village to village, to settle up, with the
aid of the village elders, every case of debt of the

* Perhaps one in a thousand agriculturists is a trader as well
as an agriculturist. With these and their trade transactions we
need not concern oui'selves.

[ 76 ]

kind referred to, in which any one of its inhabitants
was concerned.

These judges would be fettered by no codes and no
forms of procedure, and they would hear both parties'
stories, coram populo, on the village platform of the
debtor's own village. It is needless to tell any one
who knows the country that while, when you get him
into court, no witness seems to be able to tell the
truth, on his own village platform, surrounded by his
neighbours, no villager in personal questions like
these seems able to tell an untruth. Everybody
knows everybody else's affairs; let the speaker deviate
perceptibly from the facts, and immediately out go
tongues all round, and jeers and cries of '' Wah,"
" Wah," remind him that he is not in court, and that
that kind of thing will not go down at home.

The decisions thus passed would be final. Very likely
some few of them would not be quite correct accord-
ing to our ideas, but that signifies little ; they would
embody simple justice according to native ideas, and
that is all we want ; and even though a fraction did
not do full justice according to even native ideas, we
must accept some drawbacks in every arrangement,
and, as every native says, better half justice at once
than full justice after long delay and expensive liti-
gation. Above all, even if in a few cases a partial
failure of justice resulted, they would be absolutely
insignificant in number as compared with those in
which, under our present system, the failure is total.

Common sense would be the judge's sole guide.
He would consider the merits of the case, the sum
originally advanced, the payments made on account,

[ 77 ]

the ordinary profits in regular (as opposed to specula-
tive) trade in the neighbourhood, and either declare
the debt discharged, or fix the amount still fairly due,
and the interest, if any, thenceforth payable.

All this is in favour of the agriculturist ; but, the
decree given, the capitalist would no longer have to
spend and spend, and petition and petition, to get it
executed. The decree would be made over to the
head revenue official* of the jurisdiction, whose duty
it would be to see it realised, as an arrear of land
revenue, as rapidly as was consistent with not ruining
the debtor, without the money-lender taking any
further trouble about the matter.

In some localities the state of the people is such
that it would be desirable to set perhaps a hundred
such judges to work for three months in a single dis-
trict, assigning to each a circle of from ten to twenty
villages according to population, and requiring the
judges to adjust every such matter pending in each
village, and voiding all claims not laid before them
for adjustment. In other districts, again, one such
judge for each pergunnah, tuppah, or other convenient
local subdivision, or even one such for each tahsil or
other local revenue circle would suffice, and it might
not be necessary here to void claims not presented,
but only to empower the judge to decide all cases
brought before them by either party.

In many districts no immediate action seems called

* Tahsildar (Upper India) ; MooTctearkar (Sindh) ; Mamlutdar
(Bombay), &c.

[ 78 ]

for, and most of those in whicli it is needed would be
found to present minor peculiarities, requiring a corre-
sponding adjustment of details. In some cases it
would only be necessary to deal with the indebted-
ness of the landholders, in others only with that of
the cultivators ; while in some all classes of agricul-
turists need protection. All this would be for the
decision of the local administrations in consultation
with their revenue and agricultural officers ; all that
it is here pretended to give, is the cloth ; if it is to
wear well the coat must be carefully fitted in every
instance.

The broad principles are, that whenever and wher-
ever agricultural progress, on which the future welfare
of the empire must, in a great measure, depend, is
impeded or rendered impossible by the indebtedness
of any or all classes of agriculturists, all questions
connected with such indebtedness shall be removed
from the cognisance of the civil courts, and their sum-
mary and final adjustment provided for by the instru-
mentality of respectable native judges versed in rural
affairs, aided, but not governed, by the advice of the
local elders in the village where the debtor resides ;
no fees of any kind to be paid ; no stamps to be re-
quired ; no pleaders or lawyers to be allowed to take
any part in the transactions; decisions to be given
effect to (equally without charge) by the revenue
officials of the circle as speedily as is consistent with
not ruining the debtor, and these officials to possess,
in regard to amounts decreed, the same powers that
they do in regard to arrears of land revenue. Adjust-
ments once effected, arrangements to be made, either

[ 79 ]

by the retention of a limited number of these rural
judges or by other measures, to prevent a relapse.

It must be freely admitted that, under the proposed
system, something like two-thirds of the existing total
claims against agriculturists will probably be dis-
allowed. In former days, when relations between
money-lenders and agriculturists were less strained
than they have now become in many places, the writer,
taking advantage of his position and influence as dis-
trict officer, has, as arbitrator, disposed, with the
consent of both parties, of hundreds of such cases,
precisely as he now proposes that the rural judges
should be empowered to dispose of them.

Every case varies, and naturally some money-lenders
are more honest, others more usurious ; but it is be-
lieved that, taking a large series of such claims, it
might be broadly asserted that, out of the sum total
claimed, one-third was fairly due, one-third fairly
enough put on to compensate for the uncertainties
and intolerable delays and expenses (licit and illicit)
of our courts, and that one- third was an inequitable
charge due to exorbitant interest and compound in-
terest.*

It would appear, therefore, that the proposed mea-
sure would be a great blow to the capitalist class,
and that there might be danger, existing debts once
cleared, of the money-lenders refusing to make new
advances.

In the first place, once the people were fairly out of

24 to 30 per cent, are not at all unheard-of rates.

[ 80 ]

debt much fewer advances would be required, and
the majority of these would not be to save ancestral
holdings, but only to improve them ; advances always
more readily obtainable and at easier rates, because
often made by classes of capitalists who will not deal
with nearly ruined men.

In the second place, the native mofussil capital
employed in usury is believed to be more than three-
fold that employed in trade. By no possible means
could the amount of the latter be more than doubled
for many years, so that for a long time two-thirds at
least of the capital now employed in money-lending in
the mofussil must continue to be so employed.

In the third place, as a matter of fact (and this
assertion is based on the repeated assertions of scores
of village bankers in the Doab), many money-lenders
would be perfectly content to have all their money out
in agricultural advances at nine per cent, if they
might make these at the village platform, before the
rural judge, without going near any other court, with-
out any bonds or stamps, and could then look for the
recovery of any items not voluntarily repaid, to the
revenue officers of the circle, and they would gladly let
Government keep half per cent, of all it realised for
them (and this would more than cover any expense
incurred), and accept such slight losses as might prove
inevitable.

It is necessary here to explain that losses, under
such circumstances, would be rare in the extreme.
Aside from the fatal lotteries of the civil courts, and
dealt with in his own village, the Indian peasant is
very honest, and he is still a great respecter of autho-

[ 81 ]

ritj. Only death could prevent ninety-nine Hundredths
of our rural population paying a debt fairly incurred,
on which a reasonable rate of interest was charged,
and which they understood that the authorities required
them to pay. And in the event of death, in nine
cases out of ten, the heirs and representatives of the
deceased who take up his land, would be quite as
ready to take up the debt as if it were their own, and
anyhow whoever took the land would have to take up
the debt. In estates under the Court of Wards, not
leased out but managed direct by revenue officials,
large sums are often given out as advances, and again
recovered to the uttermost fraction. Or when some
loss is sustained by men dying, or others whose cattle
have died, and whose crops have failed absconding,*
this under good management is small.

Nor is it even necessary, though it is desirable, that
there should be authority behind to sanction the debt.
A gentleman, many years a planter in a district of
which the writer had charge for a decade, remarked
to him, speaking of cultivators : —

" Deal with them wisely and fairly, and there is no
difficulty. I give out large advances every year. I
have never had a suit in any court with any ryot, and

* As a rule it is bad management when men abscond. It is
from fright they do so ; they know they owe money ; they find
themselves, by some calamity, beggars ; they do not know what
the consequences may be, and they run away. Many a time, in
wards' estates, have I sent some relative with a few rupees to re-
assure and bring such men back, and many a time have I known
others, who could not be traced, come back two, three, four, years
later, with their whole debt, earned elsewhere, in their hands.

6

[ 82 ]

I have never lost any money worth speaking of. Mis-
fortunes will happen, and you may have to wait and
to do what sometimes looks like throwing good money
after bad, but give them time and they will pay, if
they feel you have always been on the square with
them."

It may safely be asserted that it rests merely with
us to redeem our people from the slavery of debt, and
to ensure them a continuance of the enjoyment of the
major portion of the capital hitherto available to
them, and on incomparably easier and more satisfactory
terms.

But it is conceivable that in some particular locality
there might be a temporary strike of the money-
lenders, and it is not only conceivable, but certain,
that in some localities the Agricultural Department
will find that the capital theretofore there available is
wholly inadequate for the efficient working of the
land.

So most certainly it is necessary to foresee the pro-
bability in some instances of Government having itself
temporarily to undertake the duty of making ad-
vances.

Here it will perhaps be said that the system has
already been tried and has failed. As a matter of
fact, no real trial has ever been made, and it is,
humanly speaking, certain that any properly made
trial must succeed.

What has been done two or three times is this :
Some district officer, already burthened with abso-
lutely innumerable other duties, answerable to from
twelve to twenty different superiors, each worrying

[ 83 ]

his life out about his own section of the administration,
has yet seen what was wanted and has asked permis-
sion to make advances. This has been accorded on a
small scale, too small to pay its way, but still calcu-
lated to be of some use as an experiment. A begin-
ning has been made, in one instance that I can recall
in Oudh, on marvellously good lines, considering that
the responsible officer had no time to give to the
matter. Still his heart was in it, and at first some-
thing seemed to be coming of it. Long before any
conclusion could be formed, the father of the scheme
falls sick, or is promoted, or is transferred, and a new
man comes who cares for none of these things ; how
many amongst us care to be bothered with other
folks' trouble-giving children ? Of course ^he scheme
dies away.

Naturally I contemplate no such half-hearted ped-
dling arrangements. The advances must be on a scale
to pay for their administration, and the officer who
makes them must have these and nothing else to attend
to ; it must be by these he makes or mars his reputa-
tion, stands or falls.

The agriculturist can well afford to pay nine per
cent, for any money he wants. It is to him what
money at three per cent would be to a farmer at
home.

"With no courts, no stamps, no bonds, nine per cent,
will, if work is done on a considerable scale, pay all
expenses of management, all losses, and return at least
a clear six per cent.

It is not even possible that Government should have
to undertake this business generally; it will only

6 *

L 84 J

be in some special localities tliat its intervention
will be needed. Nor is it contemplated tliat it should
anywhere permanently carry it on ; there are political
objections to an alien Government becoming the uni-
versal creditor. Men are but men, and when the debt
grew burthen some and hard to be repaid, there might
be a tendency to seize the sponge of rebellion and
wipe out the foreign creditor. And, indeed, even
from the first it is probable that much of the capital
required for these rural banks could be obtained
locally from natives on a guarantee of six per cent.,
the money only to be called for as required, and to
be repayable at any time. Great native bankers even
have repeatedly assured the writer, that when money
was perfectly safe, and there was no chance of courts
or other trouble, they were well satisfied to have a
portion of their money out at six per cent. And by
a little tact in dealing with the subscribers, utilising
their local knowledge, giving them a sort of voice in
the management of affairs, and so paving the way for
it, there is no doubt that after a time Government
would be able to drop out of these rural banks, leaving
them in the hands of partners or associations, and
retaining no responsibility except for keeping up the
rural judges, before whom the advances would be
made, and who would settle disputes about them,
(and once the system was in force there would be
few of these,) and for giving effect, as above described,
to the judge's decisions.

But we must not pursue further this inexhaustible
subject ; suffice it if we have conveyed some idea of
the more prominent features of this great obstacle to

[ 85 ]

agricultural reform, and have afforded some indication
of the direction in which remedies may be sought.

There is another large, and in Upper India very
pressing, question which must have the early attention
of the Agricultural Department. "We have already
described the progress and explained the inevitable
future results of that insidious saline efflorescence
known locally as '' re/^." No one can doubt that one
of two measures is essential — either give up all hopes of
making canals pay, and only allow irrigation, in locali-
ties where the soil is favourable to the formation of
this pest, once or twice in every ten or eleven years,
in other words, in seasons of severe drought, or lower
the level of your head of water, reduce your subsoil
water level, allow only irrigation by lift and none by
flow, and have recourse to subsoil drainage.

So little is generally understood of the natural pro-
perties of soils that here in India, at any rate, two
strong objections are often raised to subsoil drain-
age :—

1st. — That the soils are poor enough and light
enough as they are, and that to encourage the water
to run through them as a sieve, would in two or
three years ensure all " the goodness " being washed
out of them.

2nd,— That where ''reh'* is concerned, all subsoil
drainage could do would be to draw into the soil what
is now on the surface, and make matters worse.

The answer, as all agriculturists know, is complete.
Without trenching on debateable ground, and avoiding
the details of this very difficult question, it may be

[ 86 ]

stated that, so far from water passing through the soil
being able to wash out of it "the goodness," the soil
exercises the most powerful attraction over the food
constituents of plants, and not only retains those ex-
isting in it but seizes these out of solutions passing
through it. Thus phosphoric acid, potash, ammonia,
and (except in soils verj poor in lime) silicic acid, the
most important of the food elements, obtained from
the soil, cannot normally be washed out of it by any
amount of subsoil drainage ; on the contrary, the soil
acts like a filter to arrest these and decomposes solu-
tions containing these which pass through it in order
to retain them.

Of course there are limitations, most prominent
amongst which is the fact that for each soil there
seems to be a point of saturation, if we may use the
word, of each food constituent ; up to that point the
soil seizes all it can get of that element ; beyond that
point it allows it to pass away in solution. Nothing is
more greedily seized by most soils than potash, but
you may get bog-earths that allow potash solutions
to pass through them untouched.

Of course, you may raise the point of saturation for
any element by adding more of some other element,
but this is in effect changing the soil. For each soil
the point of saturation for each food constituent is
liable to vary.

Other minerals, not useful to plant-life, pass freely
in solution through the soil, and food constituents
even, when by the chemistry of the soil they have
assumed forms useless as the food of plants, or forms
of which there is already a full supply, pass away.

[ 87 ]

So while by subsoil drainage our soils will lose* no
appreciable percentage of plant food not already stored
therein up to their maximum retention capacity, all
the excess salts now lying thick on the surface will
be redissolved, carried down through the soil, so far as
needed, decomposed therein, all useful portions re-
tained which are necessary to make up the full capital
stock that the particular soil can hold, and the excess
together with useless or injurious matter passed away
with the drainage water.

Varying as does the composition of this always com-
plex saline efflorescence, in different localitiest very
different additions to the soil, organic or mineral, may
be necessary to enable it to seize the maximum share
of the utilisable portions of the " reh " when by sub-
soil drainage it is filtered downwards.

All these are details which must be worked out by
experiment on scientific principles ; the broad truth
remains that save under, for India, exceptional circum-
stances, the only practicable mode of purifying land
now sterilised by this '' reh,'^^ or protecting land in
course of being so sterilised, is by passing the excess
of saline matters away by subsoil drainage.

It is needless to add that, independent of this spe-
cial evil, subsoil drainage, and the deep working and
oxidization of the soil that it involves, by multiplying

* In solution, of course, is meant ; mechanically, anything may,
by bad arrangements, be swe2>t away.

t Lime, soda, potassium, magnesia, as carbonates, chloride,
sulphates, nitrites, and nitrates, all occur, but the soda salts are
usually the chief constituents, and the nitrites and nitrates are
scarce.

[ 88 ]

many fold the area of storage of moisture and food
constituents available to the crops, must in the case
of many* soils exercise a most powerful influence in
controlling the ravages of drought.

The great difficulty with us, where subsoil drainage
is most required, is to obtain a suitable outfall, but
this again, like so many of the points touched on in
the foregoing remarks, is just one of those questions
that we require an Agi'icultural Department to thresh
out thoroughly.

Innumerable other minor matters naturally suggest
themselves as falling within the scope of the Agricul-
tural Department.

One not unimportant point is economy in seed grain.
It is astonishing what an enormous amount of grain
is wasted in most parts of the country in over-seed-
ing, the result being a poorer and lighter crop than if
one-third of the quantity had been used as seed. It
ought not to be difficult to bring this gradually home
to the minds of the masses.

The unquestionable improvement in the size,
strength, and condition of the major portion of the
cattle when relieved of the cruel yearly fast which
now so certainly dwarfs the young, and injures per-
manently the stamina of the adults, has been already

♦ In the preceding remarks I liave endeavoured to avoid putting
forward partial as absolute truths. Yet I feel that even now there
is scarcely a sentence that does not require further limitations
and qualifications to make it accurate ; but how is it possible to
convey in a couple of pages truly accurate ideas on such subjects ?
A general, if rather hazy, bird's-eye view, neglecting' all but the
most prominent features, is all that can be hoped for.

[ 89 ]

alluded to. Few realise how great this improvement
would be ; the writer has out of pure pity taken almost
moribund calves out of skeleton herds, to turn them
out, three or four years later, double the weight and
almost half as bis: asfain as any adult in the herd from
which they sprung. Ensure the existing herds sufficient
food all the year round for a dozen years, and the
whole aspect of our cattle will have changed. But it
is not therefore contended that much besides this may
not be done to improve the breed in many places by
an infusion of a superior strain. On the contrary,
there is no question that this will have to be done.
There are whole provinces in which the climate is less
favourable to cattle than that of others, and where the
constant infusion of new blood will be necessary to
maintain a fine breed. There are limited tracts asfain
where the cattle are perhaps, for the purposes for
which we require them, second to none in the world,
and clearly the diffusion of these fine strains will be-
come a necessity later. And perhaps the Agricultural
Department may improve on these even by judicious
crossing.

It must here, however, be noticed, for the mistake
is often made, that the last cross we require is with
prize English cattle. At home they have for genera-
tions bred for meat and milk. "We want to breed for
work.

If existing domestic breeds do not suffice (and they
are very numerous and some of them very fine), then
further efforts should be made to obtain crosses from
the magnificent indigenous wild stocks (the Gaur and
the Mithun, Bos gaurus and Bos frontalis), grand

[ 90 ]

beasts that stand seventeen hands high, whose rush
is Hke that of a broad-gauge express, and who yet
scamper over rocks and ravines almost hke goats.

Greater cleanliness in harvesting, and greater care
in separating grains* and seeds intended for or likely
to reach foreign markets, would probably do much to
improve the demand for our agricultural products, and
doubtless some endeavours will be made by the Agri-
cultural Department to impress this on the people, both
by precept and by example at their own farms, but
this is typical of a whole class of reforms, on which it
is needless to touch, as they must mainly be brought
about by private enterprise and by the pressure of pur-
chasers. Could we only secure a fairly steady and
moderately large export trade in wheat and barley, for
instance, there is no doubt that in a very few years
the better prices given by the purchasing agents of
exporting firms would effect a complete change in the
existing slovenly practices, but unfortunately it would
seem that, at any rate until the more easily acces-
sible virgin lands of Western America are more or less
exhausted (and they do appear to be exhausting these
in a wickedly wasteful manner), it will only be under
favour of bad seasons elsewhere, or of wars interfering
with the natural course of trade, that our wheat is
likely to find a wide European market. t

* It is not merely that grains of two species should not be
muddled up together as now, but that the different qualities of
each grain, e.g. red and white, soft and hard wheat, and the like,
should be kept distinct.

t It has, however, been asserted that a great deal of this
wheat has been put into the European market below its cost

[ 91 ]

Again, as typical of another class of duties whicli
the Department would undertake, but of which little
need here be said (so obviously do they fall within its
province) may be instanced, the improvement of staples,
both by disseminating the better existing indigenous
varieties in tracts where now only inferior ones are
cultivated, and by further improving the best existing
sorts by selection* and careful cultivation.

But among the secondary objects of the Depart-
ment, not perhaps so obvious, may certainly be men-
tioned the improvement of agricultural implements and
mechanical appliances. The magnificent mechanical
developments of European scientific agriculture are,
and will for many generations probably remain,
utterly unsuited to Indian requirements. On the
other hand, the mdigenous appliances that here do
duty for these, are of the crudest and most inefficient
character. Improvements in these are urgently called
for, but they have yet to be created, and this not by
the bodily importation of the results achieved by

price, having been carried in America at nominal rates in conse-
quence of certain railway combinations. In the absence of par-
ticulars, it is impossible to say whether this can appreciably affect
our future trade.

* The word " selection " is here used in its widest sense, and is
not intended only to signify the picking out for seed purposes the
biggest grains out of the finest ears and the like. It is meant to
include the careful study of varieties, with reference to local con-
ditions, and the further development of peculiarities which in any
locality tend to diminish the chance of the failure of the crop or
increase its probable yield. Take, for instance, the Long-husked
Giant Millet (or Choncha Jowar)^ which is even now almost proof
against the attacks of crows, mainas, and the like, and which a
very slight further development of its peculiarity would render
absolute proof against all birds but parroquets.

[ 92 ]

science in Europe, but by the application of tbe prin-
ciples on which those results are based to the widely
different conditions and requirements of this country.
Of these, the people who pester Government to pur-
chase grand combined steam ploughing, reaping and
threshing machines for the ryots here, seem to have
about as accurate a conception as a certain Maha-
rajah, who was with difficulty dissuaded from sending
home an elephant to an old pensioner at Bayswater
(who complained of being no longer able to get about
on foot and being too poor to keep a conveyance), had
of those of our London suburbs.

Perhaps next to ploughs, in regard to which Mr.
Buck has already done something (and if we had half
a dozen provincial Directors, each aided by proper
mechanical engineers, and each improving on the im-
provements of his neighbours, we should soon get the
very thing wanted), next we say to ploughs, no me-
chanical appliances will more emphatically demand the
study of the Department than those for raising water
by wind-power. Assuming, as we may, that as the
Agricultural Department obtains a real hold upon the
country, high-level canals rendering subsoil drainage
impossible, and involving the gradual sterilisation of
the soil, wherever this is at all appreciably impreg-
nated with saline substances, will become things of
the past, and assuming, too, that irrigation on a
rational system will be largely developed, the import-
ance of cheap and efficient contrivances for raising
water becomes obvious.

And for cheapness, in a country like India where,
over whole provinces, winds blow with almost the re-

[ 93 ]

gularity of clockwork, probably no motive power could
compare with that of wind.

At present a gigantic wind-power (second only to
the equally unutilised sun-ray power) is running to
waste, utterly uncared for over the whole empire, and
any successful application of this to the purposes of
irrigation would inaugurate a new era in the history
of Indian Agriculture.

But it never was intended in this paper to enter into
details like these, or to attempt even in the most pre-
liminary fashion an exhaustive sketch of the work
which lies before a real working Department of Agri-
culture in India. On the contrary, although we may
even now form certain general conceptions of some of
the problems awaiting its investigations, it will not
be until years after its establishment that the Depart-
ment itself will be in a position to set out the majority
of these problems with that precision and fulness
which is essential to any scientific method of solution.

After all, despite the attempts that have been made
in this paper to give a somewhat more definite, and
to the ordinary mind, more satisfactory reply, the best
answer to the question — '' For what do we need an
Agricultural Department in India?" — must still re-
main,— firstly, to ascertain precisely what reforms are
essential in our existing agriculture, as practised in
various parts of the empire ; secondly, to work out
systematically the best methods of carrying through
these reforms.

[ 95 ]

APPENDIX.

Note A.

(Extract from an unpublished Memoir on the Agriculture of the
JDuabf written in 1859-60.)

SEASONS.

•■

Our European calendar year, which is based on the true tropical
year, or the interval between two successive arrivals of the sun at
the vernal equinox, provides for the return of the seasons on which
depend all agricultural operations on the same dates, year after
year.

Not so the native calendar, which is alone in general use amongst
our up-country agriculturists. They have, it is true, a Sourhurkh
or solar year of 365 days, and Sourmas or solar months ; but these,
though referred to by tlie Pundits in calculating horoscopes, and
fixing auspicious days and seasons for marriages and the like, are
dead letters to the rural population, who universally, in every-
day practice, deal only with a lunar year of 12* months, consisting
of between 354 and 355 days. This year being more than ten
days shorter than the tropical year, a thirteenth month, known as
Lond or Adhikmas, has to be intercalated every 32 or 33 months,
and a variety of other corrections (which I once knew, but have

* These 12 lunar months, of about 29 days and 12f hours, which reckon
from new moon to new moon, i.e. from the moon leaving its conjunction
with the sun to its return to conjunction, must not be confounded with the
periods (of about 27 days 7| hours) at the end of which the moon returns to
a position amongst the stars nearly coincident with that it held at the com-
mencement of such period.

[ 96 ]

now forgotten) have to be applied ; the result of which is, that the
seasons do not recur year after year on the same dates, or even in
the same months.

The consequence of this non-conformity is that, as a rule, agri-
cultural operations are, so far as any calendar goes, chiefly governed
by what our villagers call naJchats, and the Pundits nichattr ; pro-
perly speaking, I believe, nakshattra. These nakhats are nothing
but subdivisions of the Zodiac, of which there are 27 in all, or 2^
in each ^'burj " or sign, and their names are given to the periods
during which the sun's apparent path lies within them. Of course
by the slow effects of precession and nutation, the seasons in
which these nakhats fall very slowly change, but practically they
are sufficiently immutable for every-day life, and cultivators com-
monly enquire about them from the Pundits, regulate their sow-
ings not a little by them, and have the firmest belief in certain
traditional prognostications, favourable and unfavourable, to their
crops, dependent on what happens during their course.

With the 15 nakhats that lie between about the 27th November
and 23rd May we need not concern ourselves, as one hears com-
paratively little of the good or evil influence of these; but the 12
nakhats which begin about the 23rd May play an important part,
according to our agriculturists, in all their operations, and must
be separately noticed.

1. EoHiNEE. — From about* the 23rd May to the 5th June. In
this period, say the people, the rains should commence, and this is
the time to sow maize, oorud (Phaseolus Roxhurghii) — murrooa
(Eleusine coracana). The native couplet runs —

" Rohinee mirgsir boo mukkha
Oordh, Murrooa, deo na taka " :

" Sow maize and mash (or oorud) and millets in Eohinee or Mirg-
sir, but, pay no rent."

2. Mirgsir. — From about the 6th to the 19th June. In this
period also the crops above mentioned are sown, but if much rain
falls during it, neither jowar (Sorghum vulgare) nor cotton must
be sown, otherwise, when they come to flower, insects will surely
attack them ; the only consolation being that if it rains well in
Ootra nakhat {vide infra) the insects will disappear. Panicum
milliaceum, though generally a hot- weather crop with us, is said

* Owing to differences in the calendars, the nakhats do not always begin
on exactly the same European dates, sometimes Rohinee, for instance, begins
on the 22nd May.

[ 97 ]

to succeed specially well if sown at this time. I have never seen
it grown at this season, but the proverb runs : —

" Mirgsir men boo chena,
Zemindar ko kuch mut dena" :

" Sow chena* in Mirgsir, give nothing to the zemindar."

3. Adra. — From about 20th June to the 4th July. This is the
great sowing season, and if only sufficient rain falls at this time,
the majority of the autumnal crops are got in. For til (Sesamum
orientale), jowar (Sorghum vulgare), urhur (Cajanus indicus), moth
(Phaseolus mungo), moong (P. mungo), cotton, Rousa or Loheea
(Dolichos sinensis), kulthi or hoortee or hhutwas(D. uniflorus) , oorud
or mash (P. Boxhurghii), suman (Panicum miliare), huknee (P.
italicum), and some others of the lesser millets, this is the time
par excellence, but hajera (Penicillaria spicata) is said not to succeed
if sown in this nahhat. If there is no rain at this time, the yield,
both of cotton andyowar, is seriously endangered.

4. PooNBURSoo. — From about the 5th to the 17th July. This
and the next following nahhat are the favourite sowing times for
rice ; the legend runs : —

" Pookh, Poonbursoo bowe dhan
Aslaikha ko do din parman " :

" Poonbursoo, Pookh, and two days of Aslaikha are best for
sowing rice." Bajera is also sown to some extent during this
period.

5. Pookh. — From about the 18th July to the 1st August. This
is the best time for sowing hajera, and rice that could not be got
in in Poonbursoo is sown now.

" Boo bajera aye Pookh,
Phir man mate bhogo sookh."

In other words, if you want things to go happily sow your bajera
when PooJch appears.

6. Aslaikha. — From about the 2nd to the 15th August. Kodon
(Paspalum scrohiculatum) is generally sown at this time. Heavy
rain during this period is considered very injurious, and clear
weather during its continuance is greatly preferred. If it does
rain, the cultivators never allow the water to lie in the fields (ex-
cept perhaps in those of rice and sugar-cane), but drain it off or
bale it out most perseveringly. You may sometimes see every
man, woman, and child in a village hard at work at this. If the

* This is the common native name for P. miliaceum, and is of course quite
different from chunna, which is the ordinary gram.

7

[ 98 ]

water be allowed to lie, the crops turn yellow, and even if they do
not rot, yield a much smaller harvest.

7. MuGHA.— From about the 16th to the 29th A^ugust. This is
considered the most critical time of the year, and good rains are
devoutly prayed for. The people say : —

" Mugha ke burse,
Mata ke purse " :

" The rains of Mugha are like mother's milk."

Not only does the Tcharif or autumn crop greatly depend on
good rains at this time, but many of the rabi or spring staples,
and most especially gram, are thought to be materially influenced
for the better by really good heavy rain. At this time good
rains in this nakhat make up for most previous shortcomings ; as
the people say " Chhoot khet ootur jata hai," " The failings of the
fields disappear." The only exceptions are, til (Sesamum orien-
tale) and other oil seeds ; in their case it is asserted that if it rains
without stopping during the first five days of Mugha, insects are
sure later to attack the plants. The water of this naJchat, unlike
that of the preceding one, is commonly allowed to lie in the fields,
and is said to be specially beneficial to many of the millets and
pulses. On the whole this is the period on which, according to
the cultivators, most depends : —

" Jo kahin Mugha burse Jul,
Sub najon men honge phul " :

" If only Mugha gives us rain,
Every field will teem with grain."

8. PooEBA. — From about the 30th August to the 11th Sep-
tember. Eain at this time is considered injurious ; if the weather
is clear, blight and insects rarely do much harm, but if there is
much rain, they make sad havoc of the crops : —

" Jo kahin Poorba pani dewen,
Jinson sub ko keera khawen " :

" Whenever Poorba brings us rain.
In every crop, worms mar the grain."

9. OoTTEA.— From about the 12th to the 25th September. Eain
during this period is most desirable ; the crops make great pro-
gress, and where insects have attacked the plants, they dis-
appear. The legend goes that if there is good rain at this time,
the harvest will be so plentiful that even the dogs will be too
satiated with grain to eat it.

" Jub bursenga Oottra
Naj na^^khawen^kootra " ;

[ 99 ]

10. HusT. — From about the 26tli September to the 8th Oc-
tober. If there has been no rain in the previous period, it is
anxiously looked for now, and under any circumstances, thougb
rain at this time may injure some of the Jcharif crops, it will be
most beneficial for the rahi.

11. Chittea. — From about the 9th to the 22nd October. If the
two previous nahhais have passed without rain, and there is much
rain in this one, the kharif is reckoned as lost, and apprehensions
of scarcity, if not famine, become serious. Although thus inju-
rious to the kharif, it promises well for all the rahi crops, except
barley (which it is said to injure), and this, I think, is the purport
of the traditional couplet: —

" Oottra, ootur de gaeen, Hust gae mookh more,
Jae jo kuheeo Chittra se, gae sumae lao buhore " :

*' Oottra's come and gone again. Hust has passed with face
averted. Go, prithee, and bid Chittra bring a missing harvest
back again."

12. SwANT. — From about the 23rd October to the 4th Novem-
ber. Eain at this period is most injurious to the majority of the
autumn crops. Cotton it almost ruins if heavy ; indeed the
legend says : —

" Jo bursen Poonurbus Swant,
Chule na churka, buji na tant " :

" If both Poonurbus rain and Swant, spindles and looms alike
stand still."

Jowar loses its flavour, and the grain turns a reddish brown.
Bajera yields but little, and that little very often so indurated as
to be nearly useless. As for the " musemah," as the pulses (oordh,
moong, moth, rousa) are collectively called, insects attack and more
or less seriously injure them.

My own personal experience does not lead me to place imjoUcit
confidence in these standing prognostications (of which, by the
way, I have only noted a few of the most important), but they
are so generally believed in by our cultivators that it was impos-
sible to overlook them in even the briefest sketch of the existing
state of agriculture, and they may possibly embody more or less
substantially correct generalisations from the experience of bygone
ages. I have given only the existing popular versions, but the
Prakrit originals are known to some Pundits.

All these prognostications refer, as will have been seen, to that
agriculturally pre-eminently important portion of the year lying
between the beginning of June and the end of October, which in-

[ 100 ]

eludes the periodical* i-ains ; and, indeed, it is only natural that
in a country like the plains of the Duab the cultivator's chief
source of anxiety should be the rains ; for though the extension
of canals is slightly changing the position of affairs, a bad rainy
season still means a bad harvest, high prices, and scarcity ; and a
good one, plenty and comparative comfort to all classes.

It is hardly necessary to say that, with so much at stake, an
ignorant and superstitious people have recourse to a variety of
ceremonies, both to ensure success to their cultivation and to as-
certain, beforehand, their prospects. The taking of omens (she-
goon) is ^universally practised, the full moon of Asarh (generally
in June) being one of the great days for this. The methods
adopted are very various, but the most popular are those based
on the direction of the wind at the time of the full moon of Asarh,
Pun purchutea as it is termed. The cultivators assemble in some
open plain, collect a little finely-powdered earth, and throw it up
in the air. If the dust drifts northwards, the omen is bad, and
insufficient rains are expected ; if southwards, westwards or east-
wards, it is favourable. Sometimes, instead of earth, raw cotton is
loosely twisted into a thread and tied to the end of a bamboo
(this is called Dhttjahundee), and the direction of the wind ascer-
tained from this. In all cases, a south, south-east, or south-west
wind at this time is considered to indicate bad rains and a poor
harvest. This is only one class of omen. All kinds of absurd
practices are in vogue ; for instance, at this same full moon, a few
ounces of grain are carefully weighed, and are placed in little
earthen saucers, in some cfpen and elevated place well away from
the village. Next morning the grain (if any remains, my expe-
rience being that it is generally eaten during the night) is care-
fully weighed ; if it has gained weight the cultivator is sanguine
of a good harvest ; if it has lost, then he looks for a poor crop ;
if it has disappeared altogether, then the harvest will be as God
wills.

Ridiculous as these superstitions must seem, they deserve notice,
because cultivators are often governed in their choice of crops for
the coming season by the result of these omens, and because it is
impossible to introduce any improved system of agriculture with-
out realising the extent to which the present practice of the art is
governed by superstition.

* The periodical rains of the rainy season, which occur between Asarh and
Kwar, say from June to October, are called " Chomas," while the cold-weather
showers, which ought to occur about Christmas, are known as the " Mahawut."

[ 101 ]

Note B.

Some matters Agricultural and Horticultural in which the Depart-
me7it of Agriculture has been able to assist.

One step towards the development of agricultural and industrial
enterprise in India certainly consists in the collection and dis-
semination of useful information. There has always been a good
deal of information on record on matters connected with this im-
portant subject, but scattered and hidden in public offices and
elsewhere, undigested, fragmentary, incomplete, and vague. One
of the first objects of the Department was to gather up all this
information, collect fresh facts by special enquiry, co-ordinate the
whole, bring the facts down to the latest date, and i^ublish them
in a handy and useful way for general information. Amongst
the papers published in accordance with this plan are the fol-
lowing : —

1. An account of silk.

2. A repoi*t on tobacco.

3. A note on lac.

4. A note on vanilla.

5. A note on flax.

6. A note on the Eucalyptus globulus, or blue gum of Australia.

7. A note on the various other species of Eucalyptus adapted to

cultivation in India.

8. A note on Ceratonia siliqua, the carob tree.

9. A note on Galophyllum inophyllum, an oil-producing tree.

10. A note on Malachra capitata, an excellent fibre, quite neg-

lected as yet.

11. A note on the Arachis hypogcea (the ground nut).

12. A note on Sorghum saccharatum, a valuable fodder.

13. A note on Cardamom cultivation.

14. A manual of Cinchona cultivation in India.

Others are still under preparation in the Department :

15. On dyes and tans.

16. On fibres, with special reference to paper-making.

17. On Carolina rice.

18. On wheat.

19. On Manilla hemp.

Some of the Local G-overnments have followed the example thus
set, and under their instructions reports on jute, tea, tobacco, and
cotton have been compiled by local officers. In the N.-W. P. espe-
cially the local Department of Agriculture and Commerce has
issued notes on economic minerals, gums and resins, and dye-

8

[ 102 ]

stuffs, and a Dictionary of Agriculture is under preparation. In
Madras a text-book of Agriculture has been compiled by Mr.
Eobertson, but in these two provinces alone has the examine and
encouragement given by the Department for the compilation of
agricultural text-books been of any practical use.

Actual experiments have been undertaken in the cultivation of
most of the articles on which papers have been jjublished, and in
many cases the results have been very successful. In tobacco, for
instance, but little more remains to be done by the Government,
an energetic European firm having undertaken the cultivation and
manufacture of it on good principles in farms made over to the
firm for the purpose (they were old stud farms) on very favourable
terms by the Government.

In silk, experiments with tasar have been a complete success,
and there is undoubtedly a splendid future for the trade in this
article, little known or appreciated, out of India, until this De-
l^artment moved in the matter.

Experiments in the propagation of lac have been quite suc-
cessful, but a fall in prices in the foreign markets renders the
further prosecution of this business for the present unnecessary.

The cultivation of vanilla, so profitable in Mexico and Reunion,
a trial of which in India was strongly urged by this Department,
was a success in one province, at any rate, until the occurrence of
a drought which desolated it. This article otters peculiar advan-
tages to those who would wish to derive profit from an ornamental
plant occupying little s^jace, and which may be grown in the garden
adjoining the house.

The carob tree, though long previously introduced, has also, by
the instrumentality of this Department, been largely j^ropagated,
and this useful fodder tree and resource for human beings in
seasons of drought (as in Cyprus) may now, like the Australian
gums, be considered naturalised in India.

The ground nut is extensively imported into France from the
west coast of Africa, and this article, which is well known in India,
though not regularly exported, may become an important trade, if
properly worked. So far as exhortations and the supply of infor-
mation goes, this Department has done its best to stimulate the
cultivation of this valuable product.

Sorgho has done remarkably well. Its very heavy yield makes
it a most valuable crop for cattle food. Year after year this De-
pai-tment has imported and distributed the seed, has directed
and encouraged the experimental culture of the plant, and has
collected from the growers, and compiled and published records
of the results.

Cinchona is now completely established in India, and the alka-
loid prepared from the bark is largely used in the hospitals and in
private practice.

[ 103 ]

The introduction of the cinchona was due to others, but to the
persistent efforts of this Department is mainly due the fact, that
we have now an excellent and efficient febrifuge, little, if at all,
inferior to the sulphate of quinine, which can be, and is, sold retail
in every bazar at R. 1 (or say Is. 9d.) the ounce.

The results of numerous experiments made with Carolina rice,
another staple of which this Department has, year after year, im-
ported and widely distributed, large quantities of the best seed,
are still indecisive, but the trials are being continued. This rice
is far superior to the finest rice now grown in India, and is
worth, in the London market, double the price of the best Bengal
rice.

Many of these experiments were tried in the so-called model and
experimental farms established under instructions from, or by the
advice and with the encouragement of, the Department. Of these
farms, there were eight last year, viz. at Allahabad, Cawnpore,
Nagpore, in Khandesh, in Sind, at Bangalore, in Madras, and in
Burma. There were also two old stud farms which were made
over on favourable terms to a European firm for the cultivation
and manufacture of tobacco on an improved system. One of these
was at Ghazipore, and another at Poosah.

No doubt several of these farms were so managed as to exhibit
rather what to avoid, than what to imitate, but located in bad
sites, and managed by people who had no real knowledge of farm-
ing, all the Department could do was to get such little good out
of them as it could, and try and keep things a little straight by
means of remarks, criticisms, and suggestions on the reports j)eri-
odically received.

The necessity for a proper system for the management of such
farms, and the need for the creation of agricultural schools, work-
ing in connection with them has been, time after time, emphati-
cally pointed out to the local Grovernments in letters and resolu-
tions, and close attention to the subject has been earnestly
commended to them. Without the co-operation of the local
Governments no sort of progress could be made as matters stood,
seeing that, under the scheme of provincial finance, the whole
cost of farms and agricultural schools has to be borne by provincial
revenues.

In these farms experiments have been tried with new crops as
well as crops known in the country, under different conditions and
in different soils, the results being carefully recorded, and trials
have been made of improved implements of every kind, ploughs,
pumps, hoes, &c. Of course the principle to observe is that the
lighter, simpler, and cheaper such implements are, the greater is
the chance of their adoption by native agriculturists, and this the
Department has ever sought to impress on all concerned.

Of experiments conducted under orders from the Department,

[ 104 ]

or with its concurrence and encouragement, the following] may be
noticed : —

Trials have been made to establish the relative cost of growing
wheat and oats, with reference to communications from the Military
Department, suggesting the extended cultivation of oats for the
feed of troop horses. It is believed that oats cost as much to
grow as wheat, and that the crop is not nearly as remunerative,
and the trials were intended to verify these points.

Trials have been made in the North- We stern Provinces and
the Punjab with a description of rice much grown in Sikkim,
which requii-es no irrigation. Such rice would be very useful in
many localities.

The value of poudrette, as a manure, has been made the subject
of innumerable and most careful experiments. Other manures
have also been tried from time to time, but it is unnecessary to
refer to them, seeing that for a considerable time to come the
principal manures within the reach of the agricultural population
of India will be farm-yard manure, crushed bones, and poudrette,
and against the use of the latter there are caste prejudices still to
be overcome.

At one time a blight threatened the utter destruction of the
opium crop of Behar. Appearing season after season over a con-
stantly increasing area, grave apprehensions were entertained as to
the prospects of the important revenue depending on this crop. A
minute and searching scientific investigation into the blight was
undertaken under the advice of this Department by a very com-
petent observer, Mr. John Scott, of the Calcutta Botanic Gardens,
and this investigation, carried on over a period of some five
years, has resulted in proving that the " blight " is due to a
vicious system of cultivation. The seed is never changed or
selected, the soil has been exhausted, and the plants have degene-
rated and die from disease induced by exhaustion. The vices of
the system of opium cultivation are, in fact, the vices which affect
Indian agriculture generally.

In Port Blair, also under the advice, and in most cases at the
instance, of this Department, experiments have been made with
Sea-island cotton, tobacco, vanilla, coffee, and Manilla hemj), in
every case with more or less success, although the existing condi-
tion of the settlement prevents the success being followed up on a
large scale.

Experiments were tried with the sunflower, which is largely
cultivated as an oil-producer in Eussia, and which was reported
(erroneously) to possess a malaria- destroying capacity ; but, after
a year or so of comparative failure, it was concluded that it was
more to the purpose to increase and stimulate the production and
improve the quality of articles already well known in the country
than to grow crops of which the ultimate commercial success was

[ .105 ]

doubtful. Amongst sucli articles may be instanced the ground
nut (Arachis hypogcea), already referred to, and careful enquiries
having been made, a paper has been circulated recommending it to
the attention of cultivators and merchants.

Malachra capitata is another indigenous article in which experi-
ments have been made expressly at the instance of the Department.
This fibre has been pronounced to be equal to jute, and growing
as it does without particular care and capable of cultivation at less
cost than jute, it is a fibre which will probably prove of great
economic importance to Bombay.

The improvement of the indigenous paper manufacture, and the
provision of cheap fibres suitable for paper-making, has engaged
much attention in this Department. A treatise on the subject has
been for some years in course of preparation, and would long since
have been published but for the necessity of awaiting the results
of the experiments now being carried out in Bengal, Burmah, &c.
in regard to bamboos, at Mr. Routledge's instance, and on a
variety of coarse reeds and grasses.

Other fibres, too, have engaged attention, such as the Agave, the
wild plantain fibre of the Andamans, and the Musa textilis, produc-
ing what is known as Manilla hemp. But chief of all the fibres of
India, the best fibre in the world in fact, is the vteea, or ramie.
This Department has, since 1871, perseveringly tried to obtain a
machine adapted for the separation of the fibre from the bark, the
existing manual process making the fibre too expensive for ordi-
nary use. A reward of 50,000 rupees was offered for such a
machine or process, and the best machine produced having been
found, though meritorious in some respects, not adapted for ordi-
nary use, the offer of a reward was renewed, further competition
invited, and a public trial is to be held in September, at which it
seems probable that the question at issue will be solved.

Besides sorgho, successful trials have been made of another
valuable forage plant (Beana luxurians), which may be said to be
now completely naturalised. The solid- stemmed comfrey, another
capital cattle food introduced by this Department, seems to be
doing admirably in the Himalayas at elevations of from 3,000 to
7,000 feet.

Great attention has been given to the cultivation of ipecacuanha
(another invaluable specific for one of the most fatal of tropical
diseases), the introduction of which into India this Department
was the first to take vigorously in hand.

Tobacco, to which allusion has already been made, has been
carefully tried in many places, and good exotic seed repeatedly
imported from Havana, Manilla, and the United States, and
widely distributed. Arrangements have also been made for a
regular series of analyses of Indian tobacco by the Government
Quinologist at Calcutta.

[ 106 ]

Cochineal was imported from Teneriffe, and tried at Bangalore,
but failed, apparently in consequence of defects in the local man-
agement.

The experiments made in silk of the mulberry worm, as well as
the tasar worm, are full of promise, and, as regards the latter,
the only question now really remaining to be solved iis whether
cocoons can be j)i"ocured in quantity sufficient to meet the de-
mand within the limit of price which European reelers can afford
to give.

The cultivation of cotton on the Egyptian system, and that of
Liberian coffee, have both been tried with success.

Endeavours have been made, but as yet without success, to
obtain efficient rice-hulling machines, which would be very useful
in some parts of the country.

On the other hand, the attemj^ts which have repeatedly been
made to foist elaborate agricultural machinery on the people have
been systematically discouraged. In a poor country like India,
where the rate of wage is extremely low and the holdings much
sub-divided, the labour-saving machinery, which is invaluable in
England and the United States, would be utterly useless.

A system, not originating, however, with this Department, has been
cordially supported and sanctioned as an experiment under which,
in certain districts, the State will construct wells for agriculturists,
the cost being repaid to the State by instalments.

Similarly, though not sanguine of success, this Department has
supported sheep-breeding in Burma, experimental farms having
been started at Thyet Myo and Eangoon, aided by a grant from
imperial revenues of 6,000 rupees for five years. Cattle have also
been bred on Diamond Island and Table Island. Cattle-breeding
in Mysore and horse-breedmg in the Punjab have been en-
couraged, and in Oudh, as also in Burma, a qualified veterinary
surgeon was deputed for some time to train native salutris (vete-
rinary practitioners) to treat cattle properly when attacked by
disease. The experiment, considering the minute scale on which
it was tried, has been very fairly successful.

The appointment of a Cattle Plague Commission to investigate
and report upon the subject of cattle disease in India elicited a
voluminous report from the Commission. The establishment of
a Veterinary College, which project arose out of the proceedings
of the Commission, was frustrated, as stated in another part of
this paper, and there was no practical outcome of the work of the
Commission, except a handy manual of the more deadly forms of
cattle disease, of which this Department directed the preparation ;
a most useful work, which was widely distributed, and translations
of which, into the vernaculars of the country, were circulated ex-
tensively amongst the agricultural community.

This manual describes the more deadly forms of plague so plainly

[ 107 ]

and clearly that any man may recognise tlie form of disease from
which his unhealthy stock is suffering ; it also prescribes the
treatment to be applied for cure as well as the measures necessary
to prevent infection and to keep cattle in health.

In arboriculture the introduction or extended propagation of
the following trees, some of which have been already noticed, has
been effected or stimulated, in every case (except that of cork-
oak, which is as yet doubtful) with more or less complete success :
Mahogany, baobab, caoutchouc-yielding trees and plants, carob,
Eucalyptus globulus and other Australian gums, prosopis of kinds,
Spanish chestnut, cork-oak, algarroba, and the Arabian date
palm.

In many of these cases the initiative came from elsewhere, but
in every case this Department assisted and promoted every reason-
able proposal so far as was possible without any machinery of its
own, and with the very limited means at its disposal.

London : Printed by W. H, Allen & Co., 13 Waterloo Place*

'(

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I