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Rh whose ultimate success was to be linked with the names of Cautley and Lord Dalhousie, was shown to be entirely practicable.

The Court of Directors were not slow to sanction an undertaking designed to irrigate the whole of the province which had been invaded by the recent famine. Before Lord Auckland left India, a Committee of three of the Company's ablest officers, Abbott, Baker, and Cautley, had reported upon the best means of carrying out the Court's decree. But the Afghán War had drained the Indian Treasury; and Auckland's successor, when he found time to consider the subject, stood out for his own modifications of the original scheme. Instead of a canal for irrigation, he insisted on making a great navigable waterway, whose surplus waters alone, if any, might be used for the benefit of the adjacent fields. Lord Hardinge, however, with the approval of the India House, reverted to the old rational belief in irrigation as the first requisite for a thirsty land. Urged on by James Thomason, then Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces, Hardinge resolved in 1847 to push the work forward as fast as the means then available would allow. With greater energy and more abundant means Lord Dalhousie took up the unfinished task, and in April, 1854, the Gauges Canal became a living and a memorable fact.