60 THE GOSPEL AND THE PLOW 



and cut up into gullies. There were a great many small, 

 irregular shaped fields. The land, having been deposited 

 by the river in flood time, consists of nearly every kind 

 of soil found in Northern and Central India, ranging 

 from nearly pure sand through the loams to the clays 

 and some patches of the characteristic "black cotton" 

 soil of Central India. A good deal of this land had not 

 been plowed within the memory of man. It was very 

 badly infested with two grasses both of which have un- 

 derground stems. When this land was plowed with the 

 little Indian plow it cut across these underground stems 

 and every place the plow broke the underground stems 

 a new clump of grass came up so quickly that no seed 

 that the Indian farmer could sow could get a sufficient 

 start to keep ahead of these grasses. The grass would 

 choke out anything planted in it. The Indian cultivator 

 cannot plow this land except under the most favorable 

 conditions. During the dry season of the year the 

 ground is so hard that his little plow will not get in 

 to break it so he has to wait until the rains have suffi- 

 ciently softened it to enable his little plow to scratch the 

 surface. In 1912 when I was down with typhoid fever 

 my colleagues tried to rent some of this land to the farm- 

 ers, but they would not give eight cents an acre for 

 some of it. I knew that this land was very poor and 

 difficult to cultivate. That was one of the reasons that 

 I chose it. If I had chosen a good piece of rich, level 

 land, irrigated from the canal, the Indian farmer would 

 have said that anybody could farm and get a living on 

 good land like that. I chose this poor land, eroded and 

 full of pest plants difficult to eradicate, in order to show 

 that the millions of acres of such land in Northern India 

 could be redeemed and made profitable. Another reason 



