The Improvement of Indian Agriculture. 
859 
“ their Father and their God ” for upwards of five thousand years ; 
that where agriculture is manifestly inferior it is more the result of 
the absence of natural facilities which exist in better cultivated 
districts than from inherent bad systems of cultivation ; and that the 
improvement in Indian agriculture will be best promoted, first, by 
the introduction of superior indigenous methods of cultivation from 
provinces and districts where they are practised to others where 
they are not, secondly, by the spread of technical education, 
particularly in agriculture and the rural arts generally, thirdly, by 
the establishment of systematic agricultural inquiry and record, 
and fourthly, by the systematic promotion and encouragement of 
water, wood, fuel, and manure supplies. 
In almost every chapter Dr. Yoelcker reiterates his advocacy of 
widely extended elementary technical education, which is really one 
of the greatest problems pressing on the attention of the Govern- 
ment of India. 
The populated area of continental India, Mr. Baines shows, is 
1,560,160 square miles, the number of its population being not 
less than 287,223,431, of which only 27,251,176, or 9 - 4 per cent., is 
urban, the rest being all rural, that is, engaged in pastoral or 
agricultural occupations ; and even a large proportion of the so- 
called urban population is engrossed in industries and callings 
dependent on agriculture. In other words, India represents the 
largest continuous area of tropical and sub-tropical soil, with the 
densest and widest diffused agricultural population in the whole 
world. This is the economic force of India, the force that 
has really supported the civilisation of the Old World, through 
the commerce of which India has been the perennial head- 
spring from before the beginnings of authentic history. Indeed, 
this force has made in succession the history of ancient Egypt, 
Mesopotamia, Greece, Italy, of mediaeval Egypt, and Genoa, and 
Venice, of Portugal, Holland, England, and once again of 
modern Greece, Italy, and Egypt. Yet this force is still for the 
greater part latent, and that after 150 years of the supremacy of 
British rule throughout the length and breadth of the vast extended, 
fertile continent, for it is that rather than a peninsula, with its 
teeming millions of the most industrious and patient agriculturists 
ever evolved by any known division of the great Aryan race, and 
blessed with a civilisation, with an unbroken tradition of 5,000 years, 
essentially identical with that of Ancient Greece and Borne ; and 
which is yet destined to be the means of relinking the chain of the 
intellectual development of modern and ancient Europe at the point 
where its continuity was broken by the disruption of the 
Empire of the Caesars, and the closing of the schools of Greek philo- 
sophy at Athens, and of Greek science at Alexandria. And the 
simple explanation of this otherwise inexplicable latency of the 
economic force of India is the false, because foreign, ill-considered, 
impractical, and fruitless education we have enforced through our 
political ascendency on the people of India. We have given them 
an English education, and that not a practical, but a scholastic 
