Page:Arthur Cotton - The Madras Famine - 1898.djvu/9

 India from Famines, so that now we have before our eyes the sad and most humiliating scene of magnificent Works that have cost poor India 160 millions, which are so utterly worthless in the respect of the first want of India, that millions are dying by the side of them. Could there be a more grievous proof of our strange want of wisdom in our management of the Country of which God has been pleased to make us the Guardians? Had one quarter of this money been spent on the Works that were the first required for India’s peculiar needs, not only would there be entire security of food for the people themselves, but India would at this moment have been feeding England, for it is nothing but the want of cheap carriage from the great Wheat districts of India that prevents 20 millions worth of our own staple food coming from that Dependency. We cannot therefore, be surprised that the word Water has been so carefully left out of the Indian discussions on the Famine, in the House of Commons and at Cooper’s Hill. If it is said, But our present question is what must be done to save the people’s lives now, I answer, We are spending Millions! How are we to spend them? We are employing a Million of people! How should we employ them? If in consideration of this question we are to exclude the word Water, if this is a sine qua non in the matter, we must lose all the money and leave the Country in the same state of exposure to the horrors of another Famine. The main point of all is this, that we have the most indisputable proof that the Country must not leave the Famine in the hands of the India Office. Nothing can be more certain than that a real and independent discussion is absolutely required. In the case of the Inflexible and the Navy this has been seen and acknowledged, and a Commission, independent of the Officials and free from the bias that their peculiar position brings them under as essential to the effectual investigation of the subject, has been granted, and the case of the Indian Famine is exactly the same. The India Office are so committed against Irrigation and cheap transit that it is perfectly hopeless to attempt a solution of the question by leaving the matter in