ABSTRACT
Another point which is connected with famine and which famine brings into disagreeable prominence is that something must be radically wrong when the failure of rain means failure of irrigation even in extensive tracts set down as tank-fed, tracts which are therefore not solely dependent—mana-vari as we call them in our Presidency—on the fall of rain. Now that it is declared in the budget that the programme of purely protective railway works has been practically exhausted, one big drain on the famine grant may be said to be at an end and the prospects of irrigation may be taken vastly to brighten; for there has all along been a contrast, as it was bound to be, between the way the claims of the railway and the claims of irrigation were respectively met. I say “as it was bound to be,” because the cause of railway is virtually the cause of enterprise, of commerce of manufacture, of railway rolling stock and of ambitious engineering; and the representatives of each and all of these necessarily unite their lusty voices and focus their cultured and energetic intelligence on it—a species of advantage which the unlettered and inert peasantry can never hope to command.
