Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/41

 An Agricultural Department. But while thus engaged in large transactions for the benefit of the public revenue, his anxious thought continued always to be for the welfare of the peasant cultivators ; and fortunately his views met with the fullest sympathy from Lord Mayo, who became Governor-General in 1869. Lord Mayo was himself a practical agriculturist ; he had indeed farmed for a livelihood, and made a living out of it : "Many a day," he used to say, "have I stood the livelong day in the market selling my beasts." Hitherto the attention of the Government had been chiefly directed to collecting the revenue, and little had been done to develop agricultural resources ; more energy had been applied to shearing the sheep than to feeding him. Lord Mayo, as an expert, understood the fatal consequences of such a policy; and in consultation with Mr. Hume, proposed to provide a remedy, by organizing the agricultural ' department on a business footing as a genuine Bureau of I Agriculture, and placing it under a competent Director-General, with a free hand to work out the salvation of rural India.

In a pamphlet entitled "Agricultural Reform in India," published in 1879, Mr. Hume gives particulars of this scheme, which proposed to make the Director-General of Agriculture a whole-time officer, supreme in his own department, and only nominally attached for official purposes to the Secretariat : "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 experts. They were to work partly through the