It is now, throughout the numerous plantations
in Mysore, from six to seven rupees a month, and a labourer can live on
about two rupees a month. Such a statement made of any country would
indicate a satisfactory degree of progress; but whereas in England it
would simply mean a greater ability in the working classes to live in an
improved condition, and perhaps some improvement in the condition of the
shopkeepers with whom they dealt, in India it means the creation of a
social and ever wide-spreading revolution. For when in India capital is
introduced, and employment on a large scale is afforded to the people, the
poorer of the peasant classes are at once able to free themselves from
debt, and the labourers soon save enough money to enable them to start in
agriculture, coffee culture, or any culture within, their reach. The
result of this, in my experience, has been most remarkable. When I started
in Manjarabad, for instance, the planters relied solely on labour procured
from the adjacent villages. But now the local labourer is almost a thing
of the past, for he has taken to agriculture and coffee culture, and now
only occasionally works for a short time to earn some money to pay his
taxes. When this change began, the planters had of course to go further
afield for labour, but merely to produce over again a similar result by
enabling labourers from distant villages to do what the local labourers in
the coffee districts had done, and thus for labour we have to operate on
ever-widening circles, till at last I have heard it remarked that the
Kanarese language is often of little use, and the native overseers on my
estate have complained that they now often cannot make the labourers
understand them. And this of course is not surprising, as at one moment
the overseer may have to deal with labourers from any one of the villages
between Mysore and the Western Sea, and at another with people from
villages in the Madras Presidency, far away on the route to the Bay of
Bengal. Field after field, and village after village, has thus been
irrigated by that capital for which India thirsts, and which, as we have
seen, produces such wide-spreading social effects on the welfare of the
people, and, consequently, on the resources of the State--enabling land to
be more largely and fully developed, wells to be dug, gardens to be made,
and the people to pay with greater ease the demands of the Government. But
there is yet another point of great i