Page:Arthur Cotton - The Madras Famine - 1898.djvu/13

 other people by surprise, but they will, I hope, be allowed to have been honestly arrived at. Wherever, in India, agriculture is entirely dependent on the sky for its supply of Water, any very sensible failure of the periodical rain is inevitably followed by a corresponding failure of the crops, and the Government, besides having to make large remissions of Land Revenue, has to incur a large and often immense expenditure in order to prevent the defaulting Cultivators from dying of starvation. In such cases, if Irrigation has been provided, the value of such Works becomes strikingly evident. The enormous outlay of the Famine of 1874 would have been more enormous still, but for the Sone Canal which, even then in its imperfect condition, and when the entire expenditure on it had not exceeded £800,000, enabled luxuriant harvests, valued at £500,000, to come to maturity over 159,000 acres where otherwise every green leaf must have been parched into powder,” and so on. “If the indirect savings in this way are added to the direct annual earnings, the result would be a total that would convince the most sceptical, that, regarded as a whole, the investment of the Indian Government in Irrigation Works, has hitherto been the reverse of unprofitable.” He adds many things to the same purport. Our next India Office testimony is Mr. Cassells, also a Member of the Council, who was in the chair on the same occasion, and who said; “He had never seen the facts and figures more clearly brought forward on this important subject. He felt very proud to think that he had insisted upon this subject being brought forward, and had asked Mr. Thornton to take it in hand. As a Merchant long acquainted with trade, he concurred in the fullest manner with what Sir Arthur Cotton had said as to the necessity of providing cheap transit if you to wished make a Country prosperous; in fact it was the foundation of all good trade and of National wealth. He begged to assure him, however, that there were those upon the India Committee who never lost an opportunity of insisting upon that policy. And