ernment, and that not only does it far exceed any irrigation of former rulers of India, but that there has been and is no system of irrigation in the world at all comparable to the canals of India. Under the management or supervision of the British Government, there are about 46,000 miles of canals and distributaries, giving the means of irrigation to twenty-three million acres of land. The area annually irrigated in India from canals alone (that is, apart from storage reservoirs and tanjs, ells, and other sources which water some twenty million acres more) is about five times as large as the whole of the irrigated area of Egypt. Sir John Strachey observes, No similar works in other countries approach in magnitude the irrigation works of India, and no public works of nobler utility have ever been undertaken in the world. No year passes without some important extension of irrigation. .

"The comparative merits of irrigation works on the one hand and railways and roads on the other in developing agricultural prosperity have been much discussed; but the moderate advocate allows that all that is possible should be done under both heads. Irrigation directly increases the harvests. Railways and roads indirectly increase them.

"Up to the middle of last century there were hardly any roads in India worthy the name; and when the mutiny of the Sepoys broke out in 1857, only 120 miles of railway were open in Bengal, and about as much in Bombay and Madras. There are now 37,000 miles of metaled roads, 136,000 miles of unmetaled roads, and about 33,000 miles of railway open to traffic. If access to markets has discouraged the storage of grain, it has also increased the income of cultivators and landholders, and the deficiencies of an area of scarcity, or famine, are supplied from the surplus of more fortunate districts. Down to the end of 1909 about £360,000,000 had been spent on railways and irrigation works. The construction of such works by Government, or under Government guarantee, in India is limited by the ability of the Government to raise money by taxation or on loans."

TAXATION IN INDIA

India's system of taxation is too complicated a subject to deal with in the limited space at our disposal. From time immemorial the principle that the State should share directly in the produce of the soil has been a fundamental maxim of Indian finance. In

Hindu villages the grain was thrown together in a common fund, and from this store was subtracted the share of the State. Under the Mogul Empire an army of zamindars, tax-farmers, similar to the publicans of New Testament times, was superimposed upon the former system of collection. Under Akbar the Great, a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth, the rate was fixed at one-fourth the gross produce, and the revenue derived from this tax was, in purchasing value, more than double that which the AngloIndians receive from the same territory. The British Government has built up a compromise system of tax collection, recognizing in some districts the rights of the hereditary zamindar, now a landlord, and in others the vested interest of the ryot, or peasant proprietor. The whole tendency has been towards the foundation of a tax code that will on the one hand control the rack-renting propensity of the zamindar, protect the leasehold of the ryot, and at the same time effect a just apportionment of taxation.

It hardly need be said that none of this revenue is sent as "tribute money" to England. India's Government is self-supporting and nothing more. England has far more reason to complain of the drain upon her resources, made by the constant demands of the Indian civil and military service for the best and most promising of her youth, than India has to complain of the exactions of the Imperial Government. Contrary to Professor Roy's inference, the Indian civil service is not a refuge for younger sons and incompetent aliens in search of large salaries and little work. It can be entered only after a severe competitive examination. It is maintained only at a very real sacrifice of health and wealth. The reward which it offers to ambitious Englishmen is chiefly the satisfaction that comes from hard work well done.

AN AMERICAN MISSIONARY ON TAXATION

From an American missionary in Allur, Nellore District, South India, we have received an interesting letter giving us an illustration of how this English tax system works out in actual practice. The Rev. W. S. Davis writes:

"I came to this country when I was about thirty years of age. I have been here for a little more than twenty years. I have passed through one famine. During that time I had on relief work upwards of one thousand people.

I passed in and out among them day after day for several weeks. I know something of what it means to the people when famine conditions exist. I know what it means when these people take their daily wage and go to the market for grain, and it is refused them, not because there is no grain, but because the merchant is holding it for a higher price. And I know something of the causes which produce famine conditions.

Mr. Roy says: The trouble is that, the taxes imposed by the British Government being fifty per cent of the produce, the Indian starves that England's annual revenue may not be reduced by a dollar.' Now, what are the facts? Dry land is taxed at the rate of from one to two rupees per acre. Irrigated land is taxed at from five to seven and one-half rupees per acre. Land under well irrigation taxed at two rupees per acre will yield produce worth from fifty to one hundred rupees per acre. There is a piece of irrigated land very near to where I am living. That land is worth three hundred and fifty rupees per acre. It pays a tax of about seven and a half rupees. At the above price the land produces rice which pays ten per cent on the capital invested. I know these things because I own the land, grow the crops, and pay the taxes. That does not look as though the Government was collecting in taxes fifty per cent of the produce."

IS INDIA DRAINED OF FOOD? As to Professor Roy's contention that India is drained of food for exportation to England, Mr. Davis has this to say:

"Before England came here, India knew nothing of the outside world. She was virtually isolated from the rest of the world by a system which forbade her people to cross the seas. She had no railways, and had to depend on the ox-cart and the country roads for transportation. Because England came, India to-day studies the stock markets of London and New York and knows the price of foodstuffs throughout the world.

"Who is to blame for sending that grain out of India when her starving children needed it? Was it the Government that gave the railway lines and steamship service? or was it the self-interest of the farmer and merchant, who were willing that all India should starve if they could make a dollar?

"England more and more is placing in positions of trust the natives of the country. In the case of a shortage in this part of

India, 1905, these men were in charge of the large reservoir. Because of negligence on their part, the necessary repairs on the works were not completed. The first river flood that came down could not be turned into the reservoir. The water was lost, and no more came for another nine months. There was grain, but no money to purchase, no credit, and no knowledge of that which drove famine out of England, Scotland, and Wales, and which prompted America to send, free of cost, to starving India, its own foodstuffs. The grain which should stay in India to feed some of India's starving millions is shipped to other countries for the benefit, not of an alien race, but of a few of India's sons.

"There are five and a half millions of ablebodied men, with their dependents, who live on the people as beggars because the caste system prevents them from working.

"Before this condition in India can become materially better, her sons must learn a little about that wisdom which compels a man to acknowledge that he is his brother's keeper,' be he of caste or out-caste extraction."

HOW ENGLAND IS TRYING TO SOLVE THE PROBLEMS

Mr. Hall, already quoted, has something to say concerning the all-important question of taxation; a description to offer of the methods by which the English are seeking to solve the famine problem, and a very emphatic word of praise for what they have already accomplished. We will let him close the debate.

"In the budget of 1909-10, to discuss the latest one upon which information is ample, the total net revenue of British India raised from taxation was somewhat under $246,000,000, or a per capita assessment of eighty-five cents, the lowest per capita of any civilized country on the habitable globe. This revenue is derived from taxes upon imports, salt, legal transfers, incomes, and a general tax on land. The last of these is particularly singled out for opprobrium, its amount and incidence exaggerated and misunderstood. Less than half of India's revenue is derived from this tax, and under its operation less than forty cents per capita is taken from the peasantry in the course of a year. Never does it take, as has been alleged, half of the products of the soil. In certain specific sections, it is true, the tax takes as high as fifty per cent of the rent-quite a different story. But even this is decidedly an exception, and

takes place only in a special kind of zamindari tenure, the technical operation of which is beyond the province of this discussion. On the average, the tax on rent runs from ten to sixteen per cent.

This tax must be, in certain cases, a heavy burden upon the cultivator; but, lest any one believe it a famine-breeder, let him compare the finances of British India with those of the autonomous native States. Mysore, for instance, with a population of five million, takes over six shillings per capita in taxation, or nearly twice the rate of British India. Hyderabad, with eleven million inhabitants, raises a revenue of over five shillings per capita; while Baroda, to pay for the extravagant living of her overlord, draws from its population of nearly two million inhabitants over ten shillings per head, or three times the rate paid by British subjects. If the inhabitants of British India are taxed to death, one might well wonder how any are living in the native States!

"The British Administration regards no duty as more pressing than the amelioration of harvest scarcity. First of all it has given India cheap transportation, an inestimable boon, since, as Mr. Morison points out in his 'Indian Industrial Organization,'' the fundamental difference between famines at the end of the nineteenth century was this: At the beginning of the century the price of food rose so high as to be absolutely beyond the reach of the majority of the inhabitants, and even at these exorbitant rates it was not often to be had. . . . At the end of the century there was plenty of food (owing to the railroads) even in districts in which crops had failed altogether.' Efficient railroad service has been the Government's first care; the second, irrigation."

66

WHAT HAPPENS IN FAMINE TIME

Nor," adds Mr. Hall, 66 'does Governmental activity stop here. To provide for unforeseen famine contingencies a fund of $5,000,000 is set aside yearly. Constant watch is kept over every rural district. The coming of the rain in spring and fall, its density and duration, is noted and reported. Local police scrutinize closely the movement of the population, always speedily accelerated by approaching scarcity. Inspectors keep track of the cattle, their number, food, and condition, and the crops also are the subject of study.

"By all of these means famine may be

anticipated and the Government prepared for its forthcoming. If it does come, the steps taken are these: The land tax is remitted, the importation of rice encouraged by bounties, and the exportation of food forbidden. Provisions are then shipped in by the State railroads and relief camps established, that none may starve. A famine commissioner is appointed, under whose direction the war against poverty and disease is carried on with vigor. Public highways are mended, new ones are built, railroads are constructed, irrigating ditches dug, and work offered to all. The death rate, of course, does advance. Many natives wander away to die in other provinces. Others sell, gamble, or are robbed of blankets, stores, and supplies meted out by governmental authorities, and the officials are not always as efficient as they might be, since those who are native born are frequently indifferent to the suffering of poor ryots of a caste alien to their own. Yet, despite these drawbacks, it may be said that famines are at last fairly well under control, as, for instance, the one in the United Provinces in 1907, where the death rate rose only from 32 per thousand to 36, or the one the year after in the district of Darbhanga, where the usual high mortality from malaria was so reduced by the drought that the death rate actually dropped in a famine year. . . .

"A century ago, and throughout all India, thuggery, the slaughter of girl babies, and the suttee were unchecked. These Great Britain ended, brought order out of chaos, built railroads, dug canals, preserved forests, administered justice, protected factory children by laws superior to many an American commonwealth, educated the Hindu to a sense of his wrongs, and gave him liberty to proclaim them.'

"So much at least," concludes Mr. Hall, "has been accomplished, and though mistakes. have been made in the process and injustices perhaps have been done, the poor peasant, at any rate, has been rescued from the domineering grasp of his feudal overlord; and for his maintenance in times of poverty and starvation Great Britain has provided a more thorough and scientific system of relief than exists in any other country in the world. Well might Lord Curzon say in a farewell address to India, The peasant is the bone and sinew of the country; by sweat of his brow the soil is tilled; from his labor comes forth the national income. He should be the first and final object of every viceroy's regard.""

A

S we skidded and splashed behind the automobiles carrying the Governor's party up the country roads from Hamilton to Dayton-train and trolley tracks were out-we had a vivid illustration of what even a mild rain may become on saturated ground. There had been a shower all morning, and it had continued through the afternoon-a steady but not violent rain. Yet by the time we started back through the early darkness the ditches were tumbling full, some of the road bridges overflowed, and every time the lightning lit up the countryside one could see white streaks of foam on every slope where little cataracts were racing down to the nearest river.

It was "just rain" that caused the Ohio floods. No large reservoir was broken, in spite of the wild whispers that flung people to the hills in Dayton, Columbus, Piqua, and elsewhere; there was not even a terrific storm. Only the steady drip-drip-drip of rain over thousands of square miles of closecropped pasture land, empty cornfields, and green stretches of winter wheat, until little silver veins were frisking down every crease, every ditch carried its brown torrent, and the Muskingum could come down to Zanesville, for instance, with a fifty-one-foot flood that nothing could stop.

Only "just rain "-plus river channels narrowed and blocked by dumps and embankments, low bridges to dam the water back, and innumerable horseshoe bends, across which, in the spring freshets, the crowded streams used to spread out and ease themselves in the days before men covered them with mills and houses. With natural channels confined and the land already saturated, even a moderate rain becomes astounding. Five years ago a rain of but one inch a day for three days over the Miami watershed raised the river at Dayton above flood stage. The 1913 rain, over the same country, was about three times as heavy. All over southern Ohio men who thought they knew the river on which they lived have been asking each other, 66 But where could all this water come from?"

As the county rainfall figures came trickling into Columbus-and they were two weeks in coming, over mended bridges and patched wires the mystery cleared.

There was a downpour for days over the entire State, and the rain was heaviest precisely where it would be felt the most. The watershed of Ohio follows a general east and west line across the upper part of the State at about the latitude of Lima. From this roof the short Sandusky and Maumee flow northward into Lake Erie; while the Miami, on the west, which flooded Dayton; the Scioto, in the center, which flows through Columbus; and the Muskingum, which runs down the southeastern part of the State through Zanesville, all flow southward to the Ohio.

A two-inch rainfall is considered heavy in our part of the world. In Logan County, at the top of the watershed, about forty miles north of Dayton, 11.16 inches fell between and including Sunday and Thursday of flood week. In Marion and Wyandot Counties, eastward along the same line, 10.41 and 10.61 inches fell. In Richland and Wayne, at the head waters of the Muskingum, there was a fall of 10.56 and 10.15 inches. Along the whole high line the downpour was similar.

Rains like these, collected from 2,436 square miles of smoothly cultivated country, came rolling down to Dayton, and the water from a thousand more was gathered in before the flood tore out bridges and whole blocks of houses at Hamilton, lower down. There are 1,512 square miles of Scioto watershed above Columbus, and 6,474 of the Muskingum above Zanesville. The mass of water that piles up under such conditions is beyond all belief. In the summer dog-days the Scioto sometimes discharges as little as one one-hundredth of a cubic foot per second for each square mile of its watershed. In such a flood as that of March 25 it discharged a hundred or more cubic feet per second-ten thousand times as much!

Zanesville, which is built on the sides of a

gorge into which the Muskingum and Licking, meeting in the center of the town, pour their waters as into a funnel, showed more vividly than any of the other thirty flooded towns the force of the water. The river rose here 51.8 feet above its low-water stagetwenty-two feet higher than it rose at Dayton and fifteen feet higher than it had ever risen before.

It had partially subsided when I came in on one of the first trains, over a week after the flood, but one could still see the mud-line on buildings along the river at the equivalent of about the fourth story. It tore out the three-foot masonry rim of the levee and piled the great stones about like children's blocks, flung four bridges down stream, and bent heavy steel girders like so much red-hot wire. The city, a picturesque place of about thirty thousand people, known especially for its huge tile works, is built in three parts, two on the sides of the gorge proper, and the third on the triangle of land between the two rivers. It was over this triangle, naturally, that the river poured as if there were nothing to stop it, and showed its wildest work.

Houses and barns were strewn about and tipped on end, sheds lifted to the roofs of houses still standing, and benches, barrels and furniture left high and dry in the crotches of trees. The Y-shaped bridge which stretches out from this triangle to the other two sides of the town, just reversing the Y the rivers make, was built of reinforced concrete, which all through the flooded country showed wonderful resisting strength. This bridge was completely covered by the water, but it stood, nevertheless, although its solid balustrade was bitten off most of the way across. The most astonishing thing about the Zanesville flood was that only two lives were lost-a good fortune due, no doubt, partly to the fact that people living in such gorge naturally have more respect for high water than those in such a level neighborhood as Dayton; then flood warnings were sent out in time, there was high land easily accessible, and remarkable rescue work by boat. The area damaged was small, of course, compared with Dayton, yet, as it was, 400 houses were destroyed, 1,815 damaged, and about ten millions of damage done.

Hamilton. about thirty miles down the Miami from Dayton, another of the mellowlooking old manufacturing towns, also felt the flood's full force. All its bridges were swept away, and block after block of houses

gouged out, so that even foundations sometimes had disappeared. The river was more violent here than at Dayton, and the loss of life, seventy-two, about the same, but the business part of the town was not greatly hurt. Most of the damage was done to workingmen's houses and factories. Over twelve thousand people here, according to the Red Cross figures, will need outside help to get on their feet again.

Down these torrents came, then, and at every city met foolish barriers inadvertently set up to increase their height. The unnatural course of the river at Dayton was spoken of in my previous article. There is a similar bend at Columbus, and the Scioto simply broke through the levee, poured across in a straight line, and swept away the light frame houses that lay in its path. The main part of Columbus was not touched, but the lowland in the bend of the river-a region of small shops, humble frame dwellings, and factories-was overflowed and several of the bridges leading to it carried out. The loss of life here was probably greater than anywhere else-eightysix at last accounts-and twenty thousand people are said to need outside help to reestablish their homes.

Of the several flooded cities I visited, Piqua -known as "Pickway," generally, by its loyal sons-seemed about as plain an illustration as any of what a river channel ought not to be. Piqua is another of those solid little Ohio manufacturing cities, about thirty miles up the Miami from Dayton. Approaching from the north, the river flows first at the town, then withdraws along its eastern edge, makes a short detour below the city, doubles on its track in a horseshoe curve which reenters the town, and in the heart of it turns off almost at right angles again. A high railway bank walls in the lower side of this horseshoe, and the apex of the right angle is the happy site chosen by the railway for a heavy iron bridge.

When the flood came, it naturally poured over the lowlands within the horseshoe, and, piling up in the funnel made by the converging lines of the railway embankment and the higher land on which the business part of the city is built, tore out the bridge. In the meantime fifty lives, mostly those of families living in the frame houses on the flats, had been snuffed out. When we reached Piqua, on the Thursday after the flood, nearly every house still standing on the lowland horseshoe either had a gaping hole or a little patch of