navigation, on twenty-four thousand six
hundred and sixty-four square miles, with a
population rather over a million,—five
hundred and fifty-four miles of carriage-road,
of which one-third are first-rate, and the rest
are in good order all the year round. In like
manner, twenty years ago, the Ceylonese
government offered to join the Indian government
in deepening a dangerous strait, Paumbaum
Pass, between Ceylon and the mainland.
The Indian government refused to join, and the
project fell to the ground. Three years ago,
a governor of Madras, more enlightened,
expended twenty-four thousand pounds in
obtaining ten feet of water; and already the
saving to Madras in imported food is equal
to a hundred thousand pounds a-year.

Berar is a magnificent cotton district,
spoiled by want of communication with
Rajahmundry, on the Godavery. It costs
a million of people of Berar two or three
millions sterling every year to grow rice
for themselves, which, with easy
communications, they could purchase for seventy
thousand pounds in Rajahmundry; and, by
employing the surplus labour in growing
cotton for Manchester (provided always that
a cheaper road than the backs of bullocks
was open for the cotton), the people would
save more than a million in their food, and
would pay with ease those taxes which now
leave the Indian peasant nothing beyond a
cotton rag round his loins, and a little rice or
grain for his sustenance.

From time to time drought occurs in every
district; famine follows drought; the people
perish by hundreds of thousands. To multiply
instances would be too painful. One will be
sufficient. In the province of Guntoor, very
recently, out of a population of five
hundred thousand, half perished by famine.
Seventy thousand marched into Madras, and
compelled the government to feed them.
These seventy thousand were all men. They
had left their weaker wives and children
dead or dying in their huts. This famine
cost the East Indian government a vast
sum for food, and a loss in revenue in the
following year of eight hundred thousand
pounds. Yet within a hundred miles of
starving Guntoor there was abundant food,
in Tanjore, a province secured by irrigating
works and roads from the curse of drought.
With due use of the natural resources of
India, with the exercise of wise liberality,
and comprehensive plans, famine might be
rendered impossible.

Water is the great solvent of the Indian
difficulties that have tormented Indian statesmen
and statists from the time of Lord
Cornwallis to the publication of the book of Mr.
Campbell. Water is to India what coal
mines and the coasting-trade have been to
England. So says Colonel Arthur Cotton*
in his bundle of Notes and Axioms on the
Development of Indian Resources. He speaks
with the earnestness of a patriot and
philanthropist, and the authority of twenty years'
engineering experience, and twenty years of
struggling against supine indifference to
everything except rent and dividends,
victories and annexations.
*Public Works in India, by Lieut.-Colonel A. Cotton.

The rivers of India, turned to their full
use, would render transit through three, if
not five, most important regions cheap and
easy, the supply of cotton ample and certain,
the people prosperous and happy. Engineering
skill in the Madras district can store,
on a vast scale, the torrents of the rainy
season; would reduce full harvests to a
certainty, and would produce in rent and revenue
one hundred pounds for each five pounds.
"Every puddle," says Colonel Cotton, " is a
valuable thing in a dry season"—an axiom
which ought to head the instructions issued
to Indian rulers and rent-collectors, and be
inscribed in the office of the Board of Control
and the council chamber of the Governor-General.
In irrigation we might have taken
a lesson from the conquerors whom he
succeeded. Five hundred years ago, Anno
Domini, thirteen hundred and fifty-one, a canal
of irrigation, near Delhi, was constructed by
Feroze Toglah, a monarch of whom it is
recorded that he built " fifty dams across rivers
for irrigation, and thirty reservoirs, forty
mosques, thirty colleges, one hundred
caravanserais, one hundred hospitals, one
hundred public baths, and one hundred and fifty
bridges." In fifteen hundred and sixty-eight
the Emperor Akbar, in a decree, which is our
earliest specimen of a canal ordinance, recites
that " The Chetang river, by which the
Emperor Feroze brought water from the
streams and drains in the vicinity of Sudhoura,
at the foot of the hills, to Hansi and Hissar,
by which, for four or five months of the year,
water was available, has become so choked
up that for the last hundred years the water
has not flowed past the boundary Khythul
and the Emperor declares that his order has
gone forth that the waters of the rivers and
streams at the foot of the hills at Khurzabad
be brought by a canal deep and wide, by the
keep of dams, into the Chetang, &c." Then
follows a list of irrigation officers. And the
decree farther directs that,—"On both sides
of the canal, down to Hissar, trees of every
description, both for shade and blossoms, be
planted so as to make it like the canal under
the tree in Paradise, and that the sweet
flavour of the rare fruits may reach the
mouths of every one, and that from these
luxuries a voice may go forth to travellers,
calling them to rest in the cities, where
their every want will be supplied." Seventy
years later, in the reign of Shah Jehan,
his architect, Murdan Khan, brought a
channel from Feroze's Canal to Delhi, by
works, including a masonry aqueduct and a
channel cut sixty feet deep through solid
rock, until it reached a point where, flowing