Page:How People May Live and not Die in India.pdf/21

 Every spare plot of ground is therefore in a condition defying us to mention it farther.

Rains of the rainy season wash the filth of the past dry season into the wells and tanks.

The air in, and for some distance round, native towns is as foul as sewer air. [At Madras a wall has actually been built to keep this from the British town.]

No sanitary administration. No sanitary police.

Here then we have, upon a gigantic scale, the very conditions which invariably precede epidemics at home. India is the focus of epidemics. Had India not been such, cholera might never have been. Even now, the Sunderbunds, where every sanitary evil is to be found in its perfection, are nursing a form of plague increasing yearly in intensity, covering a larger and larger area, and drawing slowly round the capital of India itself.

Are we to learn our lesson in time?

Some say:—What have we to do with the natives or their habits?

Others find an excuse for doing nothing in the questions arising out of caste. But caste has not interfered with railways.

The people of themselves have no power to prevent or remove these evils—which now stand as an impassable barrier against all progress. Government is everything in India.

The time has gone past when India was considered a mere appanage of British commerce. In