vari works, he might have gone to his grave unheard by the British public, if he had not enlisted the sympathy and co-operation of one of the foremost Englishmen of the day. John Bright came to his rescue.
At a great meeting at Manchester, held in January 1878, Mr. Bright supported the scheme of Sir Arthur Cotton to construct a number of navigable canals all over India at a cost of thirty millions sterling. This troubled the souls of officials. John Bright could not be ignored. The bold scheme for which he had stood sponsor could not be disregarded. Over a hundred millions had been spent on railways which Englishmen understood. But irrigation they did not understand; and to spend thirty millions on irrigation appeared to them waste of money. To take up the question of irrigation all over India seemed to the average Englishman something like taking a leap in the dark.
Lord George Hamilton, then a young man of thirty-two, and Under Secretary of State for India, expressed these apprehensions in his speech. "Seeing that, except in the delta, these irrigation works had all failed, he thought it was wrong for any one to support a gigantic agitation to force the Government into incurring an enormous expenditure, and yet keep back these notorious facts. Specially was he sorry to find that Sir Arthur Cotton had received countenance from such a high quarter as the right hon. gentleman, the member for Birmingham. His eloquence was so great that it seldom failed to influence the public mind."[1]
- ↑ Lord George Hamilton's speech, January 22, 1878. Lord George, in the course of this speech, spoke of Sir Arthur Cotton in terms which the latter resented. In a reply which he sent to the Secretary of State, Sir Arthur wrote: "Whether it is quite becoming, or for the furtherance of the public service, for a young man who had never been in India, had never seen a tank, an irrigated area, or a mile of steamboat canal, or spoken to a Ryot in the irrigated districts, and was consequently, of necessity, very ignorant of the whole subject, to speak before the House and the world in such contemptuous terms of an officer old enough to be his grandfather … is a point which I beg respectfully to offer for the consideration of the Right Hon. the Secretary of State and his Council." Lady Hope's Life of Sir Arthur Cotton, London, 1900.
