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grudging time nor expense, because we are certain, 

 from our ascertained facts, that when we do get the 

 coal, it will repay us tenfold all we can have possibly 

 expended in reaching it. 



It is not, however, as the sole practicable means of 

 materially increasing our revenues and ultimately re- 

 storing our finances to a healthy position that energetic 

 action in improving agriculture in India may be 

 insisted on. 



On the contrary, not only is this necessary if we 

 desire any large increase of our land revenue, but it ih 

 equally so if we desire to avoid a material diminution 

 of this hereafter. 



Notwithstanding the enormous additional areas 

 brought under cultivation, notwithstanding our vast 

 irrigation schemes, and our improved and really ad- 

 mirable systems of settlement, our land revenue 

 (excluding Burmah, still almost virgin soil, and making 

 allowances for annexations, such as those of Oudh, 

 the Punjab, &c.) has, if the rise of prices be taken 

 into account, remained stationary, if it has not actually 

 decreased. Yet the agricultural masses (there are 

 more of them, no doubt) are, to say the least, neither 

 wealthier nor better fed, taking the country as a whole, 

 than they were seventy years ago. 



The sole explanation is, that the older tilled lands, 

 as a body, yield now lighter crops than they formerly 

 did. 



This is what almost every experienced and intelligent 

 cultivator in Upper India will tell you is the fact in 

 regard to all but that little circle of fields skirting each 

 inhabited site, which gets the great bulk of what little 



