HAPPY INDIA 149 



in order that he may put his manure into the ground 

 he objects to pay the price. He does not look very 

 far ahead. He admits that it would improve the 

 value of his crops more than the cost of the fuel, 

 but, on the other hand, suppose there came a drought, 

 suppose the monsoon was to fail and he had no crops 

 at all, then what return would he get for the manure 

 which he had put into the ground ? He would get 

 none at all that season. And yet he knows that 

 on the average of five years it would pay him very 

 well to manure the ground, but he does not do so 

 because his present necessities are so pressing. The 

 man who is considering whether or not he will have 

 sufficient food on which to live for the next three 

 months is not prepared to make an outlay for which 

 he may get no return for the next fifteen months. 

 And then again it must be borne in mind that an 

 outlay upon artificial manure may be wasted unless 

 the manure is selected and applied under scientific 

 advice. To ask the poor cultivator to pay a chemist 

 to analyse his soil would, of course, be ridiculous. 

 He never handled as much as a chemist's fee at one 

 time in the whole course of his life. If, for instance, 

 one was applying to the land what is called a complete 

 manure, such as guano, which contains phosphorus, 

 potash and nitrogen, then one knows that it must 

 do good ; but if the manure only puts in one of 

 those items, then one does not know that it will 

 do good. And if we put in phosphoric acid 

 when there was not sufficient limestone in the 

 ground to absorb that acid, we might do harm to 



