Page:Arthur Cotton - The Madras Famine - 1898.djvu/24

 carry. If this alone is not sufficient to convince anybody that the matter requires looking into, what could? I must again notice that this line for a Canal is brought forward, not by a hydraulic engineer, but by a professional railway man, who had just completed a railway on that very line.

Surely I am most amply justified by what I have brought forward, in appealing to the public to employ their holidays in searching out a solution to this question. How could I submit a more weighty one so far as material things can possibly go.

I add some papers in the appendix to this, especially the able letter of Miss Nightingale, than which nothing more to the purpose could be written. I may mention that the question of Water in India has been forced on her attention, in consequence of so many Indian sanitary questions being submitted to her, in considering which, she could not but encounter the subject of Water at every step. For whether the people were living in a sea of mud in the Monsoon, and drinking putrid or mineralized water in the dry season, if they can get any at all; whether they were in ordinary times dying of trifling fevers for want of stamina from habitual under feeding; whether they were liable to die by millions in a famine, &c., “all depended upon the one thing,” Water. When we began the works in Godavery, the first difficulty that met us was to supply the workmen with water to drink. Now in that very tract there is a stream of fresh river water flowing all the year round, through every village. There is no longer any question there about food to eat, water to drink or wash, provinder for their cattle, building materials, or other things brought to their doors by the Canals at a nominal price for carriage, or any thing else requisite to their material well being, and Miss Nightingale is set free so far as that district is concerned to turn her attention to other tracts, and to discover ways by which the population may be kept in life and health, without the regulation of the water, a problem which will try even her amazing powers to the utmost.

I cannot but append here extracts from reports just received