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trades such as the considerable tanning industry, coffee grow- 

 ing, &c., have been begotten by the railway, which carries 

 the produce cheaply to the coast; (4) that upon the making 

 of the railway, prices, to the great advantage of the ryot, 

 speedily doubled owing to export facilities ; with this great rise 

 in grain prices, land prices also rose, so that land, especially 

 near the railways, is now worth from 6 to 1 times its value 

 when the Madras Eailway was made ; (5) that the production 

 of valuable crops has been greatly stimulated, tobacco, which 

 has long been grown largely owing to the West Coast demand, 

 being excepted. It is to be noted that railways cannot yet 

 compete with carts for local traffic of say 30 miles' run, owing 

 to the necessary delay in getting trains and the low rates at which 

 ryots can afford to hire out their carts during the non-cultivation 

 season." Mr. Nicholson's observations which have reference to 

 the Coimbatore district are equally applicable to the other parts 

 of the Presidency. We have already seen that in the beginning 

 of the century roads were practically non-existent, and that in 

 1852 there were only 3,000 miles of roads hardly deserving the 

 name. There are now 25,000 miles of road in the Presidency 

 maintained by the Local Fund Boards in fair order, 2,000 miles 

 of railway, and 1,500 miles of canals. As pointed out by Mr. 

 Nicholson, the number of carts has enormously increased coin- 

 cidentally with increase in the mileage of railways. In the 

 Presidency as a whole there were only G'0,000 carts in 1850 ; 

 in 1877-78 there were 284,000 and there are now 436,000 or 

 nearly 5 times as many as in 1850. There was not a single 

 cart in South Canara in 1838 ; there are now 3,000 carts. In 

 Salem a tax on carts at the rate of 1 rupee was levied in 1836 

 and the number of carts in the district was ascertained to be 

 1,189. The number had increased to ^-^,296 in 1847 and the 

 number in use at present is 12,400.^* The hire of a cart which 

 was As. 14 per diem in 1838 was reduced to As. 8 in 1847, 

 while the load of a cart which was no more than 300 lb. at the 

 former had increased to 1,000 lb. at the latter date. The rate 

 in force in 1838 was thus 6 times the rate in 1847. In the 

 latter year the purchasing power of money was 2^ times at least 

 as high as it is now, and consequently As. 8 then would be 

 equivalent to Es. 1-4-0 now. The ordinary rate of hire for a 

 cart is 1 rupee per diem at present, and as a cart-load is about 

 1,000 lb. and the distance hauled every day 15 miles on an 



** The argument which is sotpetimos put forward that railways by superseding carts 

 have rendered the breeding of cattle for draught unnecessary and prejudicially affected 

 agriculture is, it will be seen from the above remarks, to a great extent unfounded. 



