326 PLAouE iisr tistdia. 



tinue to be so until the people adopt a more rational style of house building. 

 At present the ordinary mode of procedure is to dig a pit, and with the clay 

 extracted from it to raise a wall on its margin and roof it over for a habitation, 

 the floor either remaining several feet below the surface of the ground outside 

 or being partly filled up with the first rubbish that comes to hand. * * * 

 In no country, however barbarous, is such a style of building in vogue. It has 

 been adopted in these provinces on account of the tenacity of the ordinary clay 

 soil, which thus lends Itself readily to the purpose. But if in other countries, 

 where poverty is as much felt as in India, building materials have invariably 

 to be bi'ought from a distance, the same necessity should be recognized here. 



Again, referring to the district of Fatehpur, he says: 



Thus for want of skilled labor the villages are all exceptionally mean-loolving 

 collections of mud hovels, and the towns which sprang up under the Oudh 

 Nawabs are all in decay. * * * if xhe standard of living is low. it is more 

 so from habit than from absolute lack of means; large sums are yearly expended 

 on the only public works which a Hindoo ordinariy recognizes, namely, temples 

 and bathing tanks. 



The alhivium of the whole northwest makes a sufficiently tenacious 

 clay, and the black soil of the Deccan valleys is even more sticky. 

 The former can easily be l^irnt into bricks, while there is always red 

 soil suited for brickmaking, or a stone quarry at no great distance 

 from the black cotton soil. When I asked the lumbardar of one of 

 the new villages in the Chenab colony, " Why do you not have pakka 

 houses? " he answered, "" We are very poor men." But, as Mr. Growse 

 said, the poor standard of living is more from habit than absolute 

 lack of means; other countries, where poverty is as much felt as in 

 India (and more felt than in the Chenab colony), employ village 

 masons and carpenters, and they have shown their progress in well- 

 being first of all in the improved housing of the peasantry. This 

 has been the recognized test in Ireland in the last fifty years, and 

 in Scotland the great advance in the latter part of the eighteenth 

 century was shown in nothing so nuich as the disappearance of such 

 '"■ auld clay biggins," as Burns was born in. Yet in India mud vil- 

 lages have entered on a new lease under the auspices of the public 

 works department. 



SANITARY ADVANTAGES OF HAINILETS. 



As to the large, compact, fort-like villages which are -peculiarly 

 the seats of plague infection, it passes as an axiom in India that 

 small villages and hamlets may be almost left to take care of them- 

 selves in a sanitary respect. The axiom is embodied in the (Govern- 

 ment Revenue Handbook, and it recurs time after time in the replies 

 to two circulars on village sanitation issued in 1888 and 1893. Whai 

 was thus obvious in times of cholera is not less obvious in the ])resent 

 (ime of plague. The advantages of hamlets are even more marked 

 m the latter, for the Bheels of western Khandesh, who were among 



