UPPER INDIA. 



73 



must be raised by loan, or paid from surplus of ordinary 

 revenue over expenditure. " 



It also appears that during the next five years 50,000 

 square miles of country are to be secured from liability to 

 drought by irrigation works ! ! ! 



Will not these 50,000 square miles be covered with reh 

 and be a desert twenty years hence ? Why should the result 

 of irrigation on these lands be different to what we have seen 

 on similar lands? What is to be expected from increased 

 irrigation, but, amongst other ill results, an increased area 

 of land rendered sterile by reh? Man in each succeeding 

 generation has but a life-interest in the land, and has merely 

 a right to the produce of it ; he has no right to spoil the land, 

 to spend the principal, but is bound in honour to leave it in 

 as good a state for posterity, as that in which he received it 

 from his ancestors, to live, in fact, on the interest nature gives. 

 Shall we in India leave the land in as good and fruitful a state 

 for our successors as that we received it in from our pre- 

 decessors ? We see the land gradually being rendered unfit 

 for cultivation, a steady deterioration taking place, and still 

 we persevere in the system which is rendering it unculturable. 

 When posterity finds the diminished culturable area of the 

 country insufficient to supply its wants, it will pass rather a 

 harsh judgment on the acts of the present generation by which 

 its food supplies have been reduced. 



There is now a famine impending, the population is crying 

 for food, and we persist in irrigation, which, by its injurious 

 action on the country, further diminishes the supply of food. 



I do not know when irrigation from wells, as a method of 

 growing ordinary grain crops, was first established in Upper 

 India, but it has latterly been considered that water was the 

 one thing required. 



In the earlier part of the present century there was not that 



