Allan Octavian Hume
fied scheme "was met with perhaps the most strenuous opposition any long-considered project of a Viceroy, himself a practical expert in the particular subject, ever encountered, and when at the last the Department was created, it had lost every one of the essential characters on which its possible success as a Bureau of Agriculture was absolutely dependent." This sinister and unreasoning obstruction reminds one of the bitter complaint of Sir Louis Mallet, when Permanent Under Secretary at the India Office in 1875. In a minute, printed in the report of the Famine Commission of 1880, he wrote : "I am compelled to say that, since I have been connected with the India Office, I have found just as strong a repugnance to the adoption of any adequate measures for the collection of a comprehensive and well-digested set of facts, as to the recognition of general principles "; and he instanced "the vehement opposition of some members of Council" to his advocacy of Dr. Forbes Watson's proposals for an industrial survey in India. The treatment accorded to Lord Mayo calls to mind how similar obscurantist counsels prevailed in 1884, when the scheme for Agricultural Banks, recommended unanimously by Lord Ripon's Government, and approved by public opinion in India and in England, was stabbed to death in the dark when it entered the portals of the India Office.
(C) 1870 to 1879, As Secretary to the Government of India.
As Lord Mayo was unable to carry out his scheme for a real working Agricultural Bureau, he had to content himself with making agriculture one of the subjects included in a miscellaneous department of the Secretariat, entitled
