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But the present Secretary of this Department, at 

 that time residing with Lord Mayo, and with whom 

 he discussed all the details repeatedly, prepared an 

 estimate, the best he could then furnish, of the cost 

 of carrying out such a scheme, including Director- 

 General and seven Directors, and their staffs and 

 offices, and forty model farms, with schools or colleges 

 of one grade or another attached, contingencies and 

 plant, &c. &c., showing that the net expenditure when 

 the scheme was in full play would amount to nearly 

 25 lakhs of rupees (£250,000) a year, independent of 

 an initial, virtually unreproductive, outlay for offices 

 and buildings of possibly not less than 25 lakhs 

 (£250,000). 



Lord Mayo, when convinced that this estimate 

 (avowedly tentative) was in the main not a grossly ex- 

 aggerated one, considered the whole thing as utterly 

 hopeless, and fixed his mind on carrying a much more 

 modest and admittedly imperfect scheme, to serve as 

 a beginning, a peg to which as time went on all else 

 could be by degrees appended. Even this idea was 

 greatly modified before the scheme was officially put 

 forth ; this, again, was met with perhaps the most 

 strenuous opposition any long-considered project of a 

 Viceroy, himself a practical expert in the particular 

 subject, ever encountered, and when at the last the 

 Department was created, it had lost every one of the 

 essential characters on which its possible success as a 

 Bureau of Agriculture was absolutely dependent. It 

 has done, it is hoped and believed, some good and use- 

 ful work in other branches, but as regards agriculture 

 it was and still remains virtually impotent. 



