Page:Arthur Cotton - The Madras Famine - 1898.djvu/19

 certainly do not amount to more than ten millions, and this sum distributed over the 160 districts of India, would be only £60,000 each, while the increase in the revenue of the three above districts is about £300,000 each, so that if all the districts had been only improved to the extent of one-fifth of what has been accomplished in the three, we should be able to earn honestly, and with immeasurable benefit to the people, what we now make by so grievously oppressing our own people, and laying such an inconceivable curse upon a friendly nation, and who can estimate the weight of that guilt that is hanging over our head through this greviousgrievous [sic] reproach to our nation and Christianity? How easily God can take from us this illgotten gain by these Famines or by another war with China. Which would be most safe, most honourable, most satisfactory on every ground of these two modes of managing our finances? But when I speak of increasing the revenue of the 160 districts of India by these means that have been used in the three, as if they were each simply isolated districts, I leave out of sight the main point, viz. that all India would be knit together by a network of Internal Communications, that would not only place at the disposal of every other tract that which each supplied, but would enable India also to send her productions to the ends of the earth, for nothing hinders this at present but the cost of Land Carriage. Only unite the Ravee, the Sirhind, the Ganges, the Lower Ganges, the Sone, the Orissa, the Godavery, the Kistnah, the Toombudra, and other Canals together, and supplement them with those that are necessary to complete the network of cheap carriage throughout India; and the increase of wealth that would accrue, is far beyond all estimate. We cannot be mistaken about this, when we have the one item of a wheat supply for England depending upon this question of relieving it from the cost of internal carriage. Between the price in the N. W. 2 s. 6 d., and that in England averaging 6 s. 6 d., nothing stands in the way of the transfer of our main wheat supply from America to India but the £2 a ton inland carriage. And so with all sorts of things. The whole subject of transit is