urban employers, the farmer will probably become scornful and indignant if he is told that the interests of agriculture are especially involved in the maintenance of free trade and the avoidance of State subsidies. Yet this further conclusion seems to follow as a consequence of the more permanent conditions of the farming industry in this country. So long as private property in land continues and the majority of farmers rent the land of other men, it is certain that gains won through agricultural protection or subsidies to farmers would sooner or later be drained away in large part into the pockets of the landlords. Even if landlords were forbidden to raise their rents, they could still sell their estates at an enhanced price. In the long run a protective system designed to benefit agriculture would not benefit the farmer. And though the dispossession of landlords by land nationalisation or by Mr. Lloyd George's system of cultivating ownership might prevent this transfer of advantages to the landlord, there are other more permanent features of the situation which cannot be avoided and which equally point to the conclusion that farmers ought to be free traders.

This is an industrial and democratic country. If it adopts any system of subsidies or protective tariffs, that system is bound to be either temporary or one which commends itself lastingly to a substantial majority of the electors. But temporary spasms of protection would injure farmers by tempting them to make changes in their methods of farming which could only prove profitable if the protective prop were turned into a permanent buttress. And since the agricultural population forms such a small minority of the whole population, and because, being scattered, the inhabitants of the countryside, as Adam Smith pointed out a century and a half ago, cannot easily combine together," it is as certain as anything can be in the world of politics that in any permanent policy of protection or subsidies the stronger interests would get their way, and the agricultural minority would get pushed to the wall. The farmers would be the first employers to suffer if politics in this country should ever become a scramble for privilege and pelf.

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It does not follow that laisser-faire should be the farmer's gospel. Besides the opposite policies of privilege and laisser-faire -policies which have this in common, that under both the devil takes the hindmost-there is a third possible policy. It is

that based on the old-fashioned principle of equality of opportunity. Just as the case for the agricultural labourers' minimum wage rests not on any claim to a privileged position, but on the necessarily inferior opportunities of farm labourers for collective bargaining, so also the farmer may hope to win such assistance from the State as will tend to give him greater equality of opportunity with employers in other forms of business. That is a legitimate aspiration for the policy of equality of opportunity does not mean "robbing Peter to pay Paul," but tends to maximise national wealth, and is therefore in the general interest. But what action precisely that policy would dictate-how far it would involve the improvement of agricultural education, or the provision of credit, or the encouragement of co-operation, or anything else can only be determined by careful and searching consideration of those more permanent features and conditions of agriculture which distinguish it from other industries.

REGINALD LENNARD

INDIAN AGRICULTURE

1. Land and Labour in a Deccan Village. By DR. HAROLD MANN and others. Oxford University Press. 1917.

2. Agricultural Progress in Western India. Longmans. 1921.

By G. KEATINGE, C.I.E.

3. The Foundations of Indian Agriculture. By Dr. H. MARTIN Leake. Cambridge: Heffer. 1923.

4. The Wealth and Welfare of the Punjab. By H. CALVERT, I.C.S. Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press. 1922.

5. The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt. By MALCOLM DARLING, I.C.S. Oxford University Press. 1925.

IN

trying to estimate the present condition of agricultural development in India with any degree of scientific precision, it is absolutely necessary that we should disabuse our minds of certain superficial and externally imposed standards of judgment derived from the study of systems of agriculture which do not bear the faintest resemblance to the essential conditions of agriculture in India to-day. Often, for example, we come upon reforming enthusiasts who would fain introduce motor tractors and steam ploughs in every holding, irrespective of its size and shape, or of the nature of the soil; irrespective also of the urgent consideration whether the holding can support the expense of a steam-plough or of motor transport for the

marketing of the produce.

After a careful consideration of all the local circumstances, it is obvious that, though progress is desirable and inevitable, it will not come through a root-and-branch reform. Nothing seems to be more fashionable among a certain class of well-meaning critics than to make the statement that the Indian cultivators are old-fashioned and ineffective, plying their industry with primitive tilling implements of doubtful utility and thus merely encumbering the land with their wasteful and fruitless work. This is not so the Indian agricultural tradition is the oldest in the world, and the cultivating owners understand a great deal about the rotation of crops, the system of fallows, the selection of appropriate tracts for the raising of food grains and other kinds crops. This may rest upon traditional knowledge somewhat

of

elementary in its scope. But the peasant farmers also know how to conserve effectively the soil moisture in regions where rainfall is scarce; to make the best use of such natural manures as are within their means; to devise ingenious expedients for waterraising appliances, particularly in parts of the country where artificial irrigation has not yet made its appearance; to space and inter-culture quite successfully after the seed-beds have been planted.

And this is not all. Frequently the peasant-cultivator's grim struggles with the vagaries of the weather, the uncertainties of the monsoon rains or the partial failure of the local rain, are too pathetic and heroic for our admiration to be withheld. In a country where both the amount and distribution of rainfall is liable to seasonal fluctuations or periodic scarcity, where within a distance (say) of 40 miles from Poona the rainfall varies between 20 and 40 inches, great promptitude and resourcefulness are needed in the selection of the kharif crops. The amount of rain which is quite sufficient for a cotton crop to mature properly may be entirely inadequate for rice and wheat, and the farmers have to make rapid decisions in regard to alternative crops, at times sowing more than one variety, in the hope that the one or the other may succeed, or at least that the vegetable and fodder crops may mature, should the others all fail. There is a bewildering diversity in the characteristics of the soils also. In the neighbourhood of the village of Pimpla Soudagar, which Dr. Harold Mann and his band of able colleagues have so thoroughly surveyed, we are told that on one side of the village roadway lie lands made almost barren with silica sand and fragments of black stone washed down from the higher levels; and on the other side are lands, rich and extremely fertile, growing 40 tons of sugar cane to the acre. The scarcity of rain does not constitute the sole danger. In the sub-montane districts of the Punjab, when heavy monsoon rains swell the volume of flood in the rivers augmented already by the melting of snow from the Himalayas, terrific inundations wash away the cultivators' houses and belongings In the course of one season their tents have to be pitched at several spots considered secure, while the losses in property and cattle, also in human life, may be considerable.

It is not contended that because, in this continuous battle with the forces of nature, the Indian peasants give an excellent

account of themselves, there is, therefore, no need for further improvement. On the contrary, Indian agriculture is not at all developed, as development is understood in more advanced countries.

The very first task of vital urgency and great magnitude to which the recently appointed Royal Commission on Indian Agriculture must devote its energies and anxious thought, if it is to justify its existence, is the devising of means for consolidating the scattered and extremely attenuated holdings throughout India, which hinder the commercialisation or profitable conduct of agriculture and progressively lower the cultivator's standard of living. The evil of sub-divided and fragmented holdings has now reached absurd proportions. It has its origin in the timehonoured laws of succession which favoured equal sub-division among all the male heirs to an estate, not only of the land as a whole, but of all the separate plots, however distant from each other, according to their respective value and degree of fertility. This tradition has aggravated the evils of the necessary divisions of the land in a country where there is extreme pressure on the soil, which is the sole means of livelihood for the majority of the inhabitants. It must be left to the imagination to visualise the amount of inconvenience, the loss of time and personal energy involved in cultivating tiny, narrow strips of land—the boundary lines alone taking an undue share of the very small fields—at small or great distances from each other. These holdings, as they get more and more minutely parcelled, no longer remain economic units. They cannot be worked properly. Field labour on them becomes casual and sporadic, with the result that from five to ten months in the year there is a suspension of cultivation and other farming operations. As the holdings become too small to conform to economic requirements, ploughs and plough cattle automatically go out of use. On dry crop lands, where little free grazing is available, or on highly cultivated tracts, it has been estimated that the maintenance of a pair of bullocks costs Rs. 200 a year. The size of an economic unit is roughly limited in one direction by the maximum area which can be cultivated by a pair of bullocks, in the other by the minimum area which can support a pair of bullocks. On the above estimate a two to four-acre field would involve an expenditure of between 100 and 50 Rs. per acre for the use of cattle-power; and this is altogether prohibitive.