Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/42

 direct agency of farms and agricultural schools, and partly through the revenue officials of all grades down to the village accountants." It was an open secret that Lord Mayo regarded Mr. Hume as an ideal Director-General of Agriculture ; and no one can read this pamphlet without seeing how intimately he had studied the peasant cultivators, on whose behalf he was striving — their merits and their shortcomings, their difficulties, and the remedies to be applied. The tradition and experience of three thousand years have given them minute knowledge with regard to their own ancestral holdings ; and he points out that they know to a day when it is best to sow each staple and each variety of each staple ; they accurately distinguish every variety of soil, and the varying properties and capacities of each ; they fully realize the value of manures ; they know the advantages of deep ploughing, and thoroughly pulverizing the soil ; but they also realize where, with a scanty supply of manure, it would be folly to break the shallow-lying pan : "As for weeds, their wheat-fields would, in this respect, shame ninety-nine hundredths of those in Europe." "So far therefore as what may be called non-scientific agriculture is concerned, there is little to teach them. . . . On the other hand, we must not overrate their knowledge ; it is wholly empirical, and is in many parts of the country, if not everywhere, greatly limited in its application by tradition and superstition. . . . 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 an immemorial religion of agriculture." In the Appendix to his Pamphlet are given a number of quaint couplets, current in Upper India, which record the traditional prognostications with regard to each of the "Nakhats,"