this kind, so long as Great Britain and Ireland have any life left in them.
As to what we can do for India in the future, we must go on, as I said in dealing with the aspirations for political progress, as we have been going, not attempting any great novel or heroic reforms, but watching, mending, improving in every direction. The greatest reproach that can be brought against us by our most hostile critics is the recurrence of famines. Why has not this powerful and prosperous Government prevented the constant return of famines, with the ruin and mortality they involve? Simply because the Government is not omnipotent and is unable to cause the heavens to open and the rain to fall. The prosecution of irrigation works can do comparatively little, as the areas that suffer most are not provided by Nature with snow-fed rivers that can be depended on for a supply of water in years of drought It must be borne in mind that India is an agricultural country. There are cities with famous names that attract attention, and to the cursory observer obscure the great fact that the country rests on agriculture alone for its life and prosperity, and that this agriculture is dependent, and must be dependent, on the seasons. More than 90 per cent. of the total population is rural. If a man could sail in a balloon from Cape Comorin to Peshawar he would see, broken by tracts of forest and hills, a vast cultivated plain, dotted over with villages a mile or two, seldom as much as three or four, apart. The towns would hardly attract his eye. There are reckoned to be 2,035 towns in all India, of which 1,401 do not contain as many as 10,000 inhabitants. Over the whole area of 1,560,160 square miles, in which much waste and forest land is included, there are 184 persons to the square mile. In the more populous parts the number of persons to the square mile is from 400 to 600, and even more. It is impossible to hope that, under such conditions, and with a population always marrying and giving in marriage, famine will not follow drought as surely as night follows
