Providence. Inflexible routine may be a welcome support to a feeble administrator, but it is simply an embarrassment to a competent one; while legislation in itself is always an evil, and our Indian land-laws, above all, have had the disastrous effect of inflicting permanent injury on the class whom they were chiefly intended to benefit. When left to their own good feelings, the landlords, as a rule, are disposed to treat their tenants, in time of difficulty, with the same liberality that they exhibit in the other ordinary relations of life; it is only when the law confronts them with its rigid impersonality that they refuse to listen any longer to the voice of equity.
The great curse of the district is the prevalence of fever, an evil which must in part be attributed to what is otherwise so signal a boon,[1]—the large extension of canal irrigation. In the autumn of 1879, an unusually heavy rainfall, following upon several years of drought, developed a terrible epidemic, which literally more than decimated the population. The crops stood uncut in the fields, the shops remained closed in the bazars; there was no traffic along the high roads, and no hum of business in the market-places; the receding flood of the great rivers showed their sands piled with corpses, while scarcely a water-course or wayside ditch but contained some ghastly relics of humanity, hastily dropt by hireling bearers or even by friends, too fearful for themselves, or too enfeebled by sickness to observe the funeral rites that are ordinarily held so sacred. In most of the towns and villages there was not a single house in which there was not one dead; in many, entire families had perished—parents, grand-parents and children—and whole streets became deserted. Probably, not a thousand people in all, from one end of the district to the other, escaped without some touch of the disease. The Pargana least affected was Ahár, which then by equitable decree enjoyed its compensation for many permanent disadvantages. It is a narrow tract of country, running along the high bank of the Ganges, with a poor soil inadequately watered and ill
- ↑ The North-Western Provinces have now 30,000 square miles, in which the arrival of a famine will, instead of bringing desolation and ruin, merely ensure an especially prosperous season for the fortunate proprietors of irrigated land. When the provincial system of railways is complete, and the Bhopal-Jhansi line to Cawnpur and Agra has triumphed over the obstinate procrastination of the India Office, 1,500 square miles under canal-irrigated wheat and barley ought to go far towards rendering this part of the country secure, whatever be the delay in the south-west: monsoon, or the caprices of the winter rains.
