ariat, which plays so large a part in
Indian unrest, by diverting the energies of young India into new and
healthier channels. At the same time there can be no better material
antidote to the spread of disaffection than the prosperity which would
attend the expansion of trade and industry and give to increasing
numbers amongst the Western-educated classes a direct interest in the
maintenance of law and order. There are amongst those classes too many
who, having little or nothing to lose, are naturally prone to fish in
the troubled waters of sedition.

In regard to agriculture, which is, and is bound to remain, the greatest
of all Indian industries, for it supports 70, and perhaps 80, per cent,
of the whole population, the Government of India have no reason to be
ashamed of their record. Famines can never be banished from a country
where vast tracts are entirely dependent upon an extremely uncertain
rainfall, and the population is equally dependent upon the fruits of the
soil. But besides the scientific organization of famine relief, the
public works policy of Government has been steadily and chiefly directed
to the reduction of famine areas. Not only has the construction of a
great system of railways facilitated the introduction of foodstuffs into
remote famine-stricken districts, but irrigation works, devised on a
scale and with a skill which have made India the premier school of
irrigation for the rest of the world, have added enormously both to the
area of cultivation and to that where cultivation is secured against
failure of the rainfall. The arid valley of the Indus has been converted
into a perennial granary, and in the Punjab alone irrigation canals have
already added 8,000,000 acres of unusual fertility to the land under
tillage, and have given to 5,000,000 acres more the protection against
drought in years of deficient rainfall which they formerly lacked.
Plantations of tea, coffee, cinchona, &c., and the cultivation of jute
have added within the last 25 years some L30,000,000 a year to the value
of Indian exports. Jute alone covers the whole of the so-called "drain."

The fact, nevertheless, cannot be denied, though it is an unpleasant
admission, that a large proportion of the immense agricultural
population of India have remained miserably poor. Indian, politicians
ascribe this poverty to the crushing burden of the land revenue
collected by Government--a burden which has been shown to work out only
to about