284 THE RELIEF OF THE UNEMPLOYED 



put in hand, and many others were repaired and 

 improved. Probably not less than half the extra 

 wells were made with the money advanced.'* Not- 

 withstanding the large extent to which well irrigation 

 is already practised in the United Provinces, the 

 Irrigation Commission reported that there was wide 

 room for its extension, and they recommended that 

 certain concessions should be offered and tried. On 

 the other hand, they recognised that there are certain 

 tracts for which well irrigation is altogether unsuit- 

 able. This rapid survey of the means of artificial 

 irrigation shows that in the course of the last century 

 something has been done to render the agricultural 

 industry secure from interruption, and that within 

 certain areas artificial irrigation has been highly 

 successful ; the survey shows no less clearly the 

 inevitable limitations of artificial irrigation. The 

 day does not seem to be near at hand, in India or 

 anywhere else, when agriculture can be rendered 

 altogether independent of the weather. 



I have mentioned before that there is another way 

 in which the periodic distress occasioned by the sus- 

 pension of agriculture may be mitigated — that is, by 

 reducing the number of people dependent upon this 

 single industry. The Famine Commissioners in 1880 

 were of opinion that the only radical cure for famine 

 would be found in ' the encouragement of diversity of 

 occupation among the people.' This was also the 

 lesson upon which the late Mr. Justice Ranade loved 

 to insist. In 1890 he said: 'The co-ordination of 

 industries, which regulates the due proportions of 

 men who plough the soil and raise raw produce with 

 those who manufacture this raw produce and others 

 still who exchange and distribute it, and the interplay 

 of whose threefold activities makes a nation thrive, 

 was never a very strong factor of our collective social 

 polity. We have been all along, like most ancient 



* § 538, Report of the Indian Irrigation Commission, 1901-3. 



