Page:Bulandshahr- Or, Sketches of an Indian District- Social, Historical and Architectural.djvu/45

 placed. For a man with the slightest element of humanity and good taste in his composition, it must be unspeakable misery to superintend the construction of edifices which will not only cause daily discomfort to the unfortunate officials who are doomed to use them, but will also permanently disfigure the landscape and pervert the indigenous sentiment of architectural propriety. The only innocent and legitimate source of gratification, of which the circumstances admit, lies in totalling up the number of miles for which travelling allowance can be drawn. On the other hand, no more devoted body of public servants exists than the Engineers in the Canal Department. They are taken from precisely the same class of men as their brethren on the roads; but they are less hampered by accounts; in dealing with such a subtle element as water, they are constantly confronted by unforeseen complications which afford exercise for ingenuity; and they have something in which they can take an honest pride, if at the end of each successive year their returns show a larger area to which they have extended the blessings of irrigation.

In a district like Bulandshahr, with many rich, liberal, and fairly well educated members of the native aristocracy, not gathered together in a few large towns, but residing on their own estates in all parts of the country, it would be an easy matter to constitute an influential and really representative Committee for the administration of local interests. As yet, however, no tendency whatever has been shown towards decentralising the control of local finance. On the contrary, the fatal demoralisation of the whole system of local responsibility as initiated by Sir William Muir in 1871 has been still more intensified. The Examiner of Accounts in the Public Works Department is now more despotic than ever. He is allowed to sequester local subscriptions and to mete them out as grudgingly as if they were Government grants; estimates and specifications, plans and sections, vouchers and receipts, are rigorously demanded before the pettiest work or the most trifling payment is sanctioned; cheap day labour is disallowed, and a wasteful system of contracts enforced, as easier of record in the central bureau: in short, economy, efficiency, local convenience, and actual results are counted as nothing in comparison with the symmetry of the paper returns. So long as a committee has no definite sources of income and no independent control over them, it is an abuse of language to speak of self-government at all. What is further required is less technicality in returns and