as a way out of the difficulty. For instance, reaping machines are already in use in the Chenab colony for dealing with its enormous wheat crop, and in many other ways the agricultural industry is being improved under the direction of the State Departments of Agriculture. I shall give only two particular instances. On the Jamrao, Egyptian cotton has been successfully acclimatised. The lint produced has been pronounced to be equal to the best Egyptian product in fineness and length of staple, and has realised very remunerative prices. Last summer an area of 6,000 acres was sown by the more enterprising landholders, prominent among whom where the Panjabi settlers, and although just before the harvest the crop was almost completely ruined by boll-worm, what was saved was of fine quality and realised good prices. In the Chenab colony, important work has been done in the acclimatisation of both Egyptian and American cotton. Here again, repeated destructive attacks of bollworm have prevented absolutely assured results being obtained. The Agricultural Department is very hopeful of devising some effective means of combating this destructive pest, and when this difficulty has been overcome, India will possess a splendid supply of fine long-stapled cotton, which cannot fail to have important effects on her own cotton manufacturing industry, and on that of this country.

FINANCIAL RESULTS.

Before closing this paper, it may be of interest to notice briefly the financial results to Government of these great undertakings. Quite apart from the greater prosperity of the people actually settled in the colonies, from the increased food supply made available in an empire parts of which are frequently afflicted by serious failure of crops, and from any additional revenues which the State may gain from income tax and railway receipts, the net revenue due to irrigation on the Chenab in 1905-6 was £391,000, on the Jhelum £10,800, and on the Jamrao £39,300. The agricultural year for which these figures are compiled was a disastrous one in the Chenab colony, where the cotton crop was almost entirely destroyed by boll-worm, and extensive remissions of State demands were given. Taking the figures as they stand, however, they represent in the case of the Chenab Canal a return of 20 per cent., in the case of the Jhelum Canal of 1 per cent., and in the Jamrao Canal of 7 per cent. on the capital

invested in the irrigation system of each. The poor financial result in the Jhelum colony is, of course, mainly due to the disastrous plague that overtook it in its early years, and to the fact that a large number of settlers are still receiving remissions. All three systems are capable of further development, and the net return to the State, which goes, it should be remembered, to lighten the burden of taxation in India generally, will rise with steady persistency.

In concluding this paper, I would like to remark that in writing it I have endeavoured to avoid controversial topics, purely technical matters and the expression of personal opinion. My aim has been to sketch in the broadest outline the work that has been done in the establishment of the great irrigation colonies in India. I venture to think that the account presents a piece of administrative achievement of the highest order, and I would remind you that the work has been accomplished by wholehearted co-operation and devotion to duty, not only on the part of the Colonisation Officers and their staff, but also on the part of the Irrigation Officers and their establishment, and finally by the patient steady industry of the great mass of the Indian settlers.

DISCUSSION.

The CHAIRMAN, in opening the discussion, said it must be remembered in approaching such a topic that while they had undoubtedly in India achieved the greatest possible benefit to the population by the carrying of water to arid districts, they had not been the pioneers in the movement. Their more immediate predecessors, in the control of the greater part of India at any rate, the Mohammedan emperors, were from their earliest settlement in the country immensely interested in the irrigation of land; and he thought it was at least worth while recalling that, to whatever part of the world the Mohammedan race had carried its doctrines and its conquests, the one great feature of its system of administration had been the irrigation of the land over which Moslems had spread themselves. That was seen in Europe in those interesting and gigantic remains in the south of Spain; it was seen in many places in the north of Africa, and it could be seen, although in an imperfect state, in the east of Europe. It was quite true that while England had succeeded in developing the ideas which the Mohammedans initiated, we had not in this particular case of irrigating parts of India actually followed the lines which they drew up for their great canals and water schemes. The author, in the concluding portion of his paper, had drawn attention to the profits which had accrued to the

State as the result of successful experiments in India in irrigation, pointing out that the Government of India was the better off by half a million a year from the profits of the enterprises. It should, however, be mentioned that, although the enterprises in the Punjab were perhaps the greatest part of the undertakings on which the Government of India had embarked, they did not represent much more than onethird of the whole of the profits which accrued to the taxpayers of India from the money, industry, and skill which had been employed in irrigating the arid places all over the great continent of India. He had been particularly interested in the remarks the author had made with regard to the area which the Government of the Punjab allotted to each individual cultivator. Mr. Robertson had stated that 27 acres of land represented the amount upon which it might be assumed that an individual could live in comfort and decency according to the ideas of the country. An almost endless speculation might be embarked upon as to the amount of increase which was possible in the population of India if the whole of its sterile lands could be settled in the way the Punjab colonies had been; but it must be of the greatest importance to the State that the surplus population, which increased very rapidly in India, could be provided for by making provision, within the limits of the Indian Empire, for those people who were now crowding and overcrowding a great many districts. The second point which interested him greatly was that the author had mentioned the attention to sanitation which was becoming apparent in the villages. Nobody who was connected with the Government of India, either on the spot or at home, could have failed to be struck with horror and pity at the unceasing spread of plague in India. It had claimed nearly three-quarters of a million of victims this year already, and there was unfortunately a steady increase in the number of cases and of fatalities from year to year. He thought with only one exception the figure had grown steadily for about 10 years. All the efforts of the Government of India were devoted to grappling with that attack, but the greatest obstacles were the habits of the people themselves, and their failure to see the necessity of paying attention to sanitary matters. Until the prejudices of the population could be overcone, the ravages of plague could not be stayed; and, therefore, anything which pointed, in however small and tentative a fashion, to the understanding of the people themselves of the necessities of sanitation must be welcomed by all who were interested in the country. The author, perhaps wisely, had not dealt with the question of the incidence of the charge laid by the Government upon the cultivators for the benefits afforded. It was impossible to shut one's eyes to the fact that some, at all events, of the discontent which was reported as being prevalent in India at the present moment was connected with the assessments by the Government of the charges upon the land. Nothing would have interested him more

than to have learned at first hand from one who was actually connected with the local administration of the colonies in what way and to what extent the charges were levied upon the colonists. It mattered little whether one turned to India and looked at the irrigation colonies, or to France and looked at the vine-producing districts, but wherever the cultivators of a country thought they were over-burdened with taxation in respect of the products of the land, discontent and irritation would be found; and it was to the advantage of the home Government and the Indian Government to inquire into and ascertain the causes of what might be called the unrest, and the measures which might reasonably and properly be taken to benefit the people who were cultivating the soil. He desired, in conclusion, to draw the attention of the public to the great task which the engineering staff of all kinds in India had undertaken on behalf of the Government. He could imagine no career more interesting for any young man-whether it was the most remunerative of all he did not know - than that of being a civil engineer in a great country like India. It was unquestionable that the British achievements which would be most deeply engraven in the soil of India were the railways and canals which had been created in that country, because means of communication and means of production were the essence of the life of the people of all countries.

Sir Evan JAMES, K.C.I.E., C.S.I., remarked that it so happened that, while he was Commissioner in Sind, the Jamrao Canal was not only designed but carried out; and he had the pleasure of obtaining from the Government the services of Mr. Robertson as Colonisation Officer. India owed a great deal not only to Sir Dennis Fitzpatrick, to whose brilliant intellect and great common-sense the scheme for laying out of colonies was mainly due, but to the Colonisation Officers. The author would be the first to acknowledge his indebtedness to Major Popham Young, who was the first practical coloniser in India. The work done by the Colonisation Officers, of whom the author was one of the finest, was such as the audience could not possibly realise. For instance, in Sind the author was confronted with upwards of 1,000 square miles of absolutely waste country, and there was an old saying that there was only a sheet of brown paper between Sind and the infernal regions. Regardless of climate, Mr. Robertson had, with the aid of his Indian surveyors, surveyed the whole of that vast area, and divided it up into I acre patches. Every now and then a simoom occurred which obliterated the boundary marks traced on the ground, and the work had to be done over again. Mr. Robertson allowed nothing to discourage him, however, and the work had been carried out in the most admirable way. He laid stress on that point, because when he left India and went to East Africa he found a most terrible oversight had been made. Colonists had been invited to places very much resembling

Sind in their level character, with very little water, before marking out one single plot of ground, not even a farm or an area such as would be called a village or a parish in England. From that evil the author saved Sind as Major Popham Young saved the Punjab. Then the labour in choosing and settling the colonists needed untiring energy, patience, and tact. He desired to mention two points in the agreement with the colonists which he thought were of the most vital importance. One was that no settler, excepting the capitalist, was allowed to mortgage or alienate his land. During the last century all Indian officials had been impressed with the force of Arthur Young's magic of property maxim. Every. body thought the ryot would profit by being given absolute power and dominion over his land, but for the last forty years they had been trying to take it away again. Unfortunately the ryots did not know their own interests, and he supposed that in many parts of the Presidency of Bombay half or a third of the land which had been given to the ryots, on which they and their ancestors had lived for a couple of centuries, had passed from their hands owing to their want of intelligence and to the chicanery of moneylenders, as alien to the country as a Polish Jew would be in England. He remembered reading the Proceedings of the Duke of Richmond's Commission on Small Holdings in England, and some of the witnesses said that if small holdings were to be a success in England the power of alienation and mortgage ought not to be allowed. Various Commissioners suggested that that was a very strong measure, but experienced witnesses maintained that unless that system were adopted in England small holdings would be a failure. He was, therefore, glad to see that, in the proposals which were now before Parliament, small holders were not to have conferred upon them the fatal gift of power to mortgage and alienate. Another very excellent provision was that of preventing the holder absenting himself from his land; and to carry that provision into effect a man of very strong force of character like the author was needed. If there was the smallest reason to believe that an owner went away with the intention of living in his own comfortable home on the remittances which his agent obtained from tenants or sub-tenants, then the property was absolutely resumed. might seem rather a harsh and arbitrary proceeding; but he asked the audience to consider what Canada, Australia, or the United States would have been like now if, when colonisation began, the colonists had not settled on the land, but had returned to England and allowed their agents to send them remittances obtained from mere labourers on the land. That was one of the greatest points in Sir Dennis Fitzpatrick's rules, which he was thankful to say had worked thoroughly well. With regard to what had been said about cotton experiments, he desired to say that the late Duke of Argyll, many years ago, sent some Scotch gardeners to parts of India for the purpose of trying to improve the cotton staple.

That

After twenty-five years the experiments in Sind were abandoned because they had not been successful. Personally he should not like it to go out to the world that long staple cotton was going to be a success in India. Of course the boll-worm might be extinguished, but his impression was that certain products suited certain countries, and that they must not depend, any more than they did in 1864-5, on getting the best cotton from India. He ventured to think that few more interesting papers had been contributed to the Society of Arts than that read by Mr. Robertson.

Sir FREDERIC S. P. LELY, K.C.I.E., C.S.I., imagined that very few present would have suspected, if it had not been disclosed by Sir Evan James, that the author of the admirable paper had been himself a most efficient and successful colonization officer, so great had been his modesty. What Mr. Robertson had said with regard to laying out a village reminded him of an experience of his own many years ago in the district of Ahmadabad, where a flood had carried away ten or twelve villages. He was entrusted with the work of rebuilding them on new sites, and remembered sitting down and evolving out of his own head what, in his youthful complacence, he thought a most admirable plan adapted to meet every requirement. He sent the plan the next day to be carried out, and subsequently was taken aback by a crowd of the villagers coming and casting it at his feet and saying it would not do at all. They pointed out that a good many of the houses were projected to face the East, and although they did not say so in so many words they pretty clearly intimated that he was an exceedingly simple person not to know that in that quarter there dwelt a demon, who would most certainly enter their houses and give them no end of trouble if doors and windows were placed in that direction giving him ingress. Although the laying down of a village did not seem to be a very complicated matter as shown on the screen, it presented far more difficulties than appeared at first sight. thought all would agree that the description of the work given by the author presented a signal example of how much work was to be done in India, and how the work which sank deepest into the life of the country was that done face to face with the people. The native of India did not care much for principles or political theories; in fact he did not know anything of them. What he wanted was moderate taxation, freedom from harassment, and his own institutions, or at any rate the spirit of them, and under or over them all a sympathetic officer who understood him. He desired most heartily to endorse Sir Evan James's remarks with regard to the land tenure question. He was very pleased to see that an untrammelled experiment was going to be tried of giving the people absolute possession of their land, but at the same time preventing them playing ducks and drakes with it. Indian officials had been

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