In regard to agriculture, which is, and is bound to remain, the greatest of all Indian industries, for it supports 70, and perhaps 80, per cent, of the whole population, the Government of India have no reason to be ashamed of their record.  Famines can never be banished from a country where vast tracts are entirely dependent upon an extremely uncertain rainfall, and the population is equally dependent upon the fruits of the soil.  But besides the scientific organization of famine relief, the public works policy of Government has been steadily and chiefly directed to the reduction of famine areas.  Not only has the construction of a great system of railways facilitated the introduction of foodstuffs into remote famine-stricken districts, but irrigation works, devised on a scale and with a skill which have made India the premier school of irrigation for the rest of the world, have added enormously both to the area of cultivation and to that where cultivation is secured against failure of the rainfall.  The arid valley of the Indus has been converted into a perennial granary, and in the Punjab alone irrigation canals have already added 8,000,000 acres of unusual fertility to the land under tillage, and have given to 5,000,000 acres more the protection against drought in years of deficient rainfall which they formerly lacked.  Plantations of tea, coffee, cinchona, &c., and the cultivation of jute have added within the last 25 years some L30,000,000 a year to the value of Indian exports.  Jute alone covers the whole of the so-called “drain.”

The fact, nevertheless, cannot be denied, though it is an unpleasant admission, that a large proportion of the immense agricultural population of India have remained miserably poor.  Indian, politicians ascribe this poverty to the crushing burden of the land revenue collected by Government—­a burden which has been shown to work out only to about 1s. 8d. per acre of crop and is being steadily reduced in relation to the gross revenue of the country—­but they say nothing about the exactions of the native landlord, who has, for instance in Bengal, monopolized at the expense of the peasantry almost the whole benefit of the Permanent Settlement.  Some very significant facts with regard to rayatwari landlords were brought out in a debate this year in the Legislative Council of Madras, when Mr. Atkinson, in reply to one of his Hindu colleagues who had been denouncing the Government assessments in certain villages, produced an overwhelming array of figures to show that in those very villages the rents exacted by native landlords varied between eight and eleven times the amount which they paid to Government.  Nor do Indian politicians say much about the native moneylender, who is far more responsible than the tax-gatherer for the poverty of the peasant.  Still less do they say about the extravagance of native customs, partly religious and partly social, which makes the peasant an easy prey to the moneylender, to whom he is too often driven