enabling Government to charge for the water, even if it is not supplied: if we only intended or promised to supply it?
Was not Lord Mayo's proposed law of this character?
Had he lived, he would have modified it, so as to charge for water only where actually given. But really no law is needed. If we only make the works, bring the water, and sell it at reasonable rates, the people are only too glad to buy it for their fields.
Was not Lord Mayo misled, for the time, by a policy—better at drawing up symmetrical laws which looked well on paper, than in carrying the people with it to do what was needed?
The Duke of Argyll's final decision against such a rate is said to have stopped two or three immense irrigation schemes (one for five millions of acres in Oudh) in the very part of the country which is either now threatened with famine; or, not threatened—the famine is upon us.
But was it so much the 'Duke of Argyll's final decision,' as the mistakes of Lord Mayo's unfinished policy which stopped the irrigation schemes?
Did not Lord Mayo fall, for the time, into the hands of the Fisherman's wife, who never would make the best of what the Enchanted Fish gave her, but always wanted something better? She, after somewhat violently opposing Canalisation for years, went far beyond its demands, and would do nothing till an Act was passed to enable her to tax every Ryot in India for water, as soon as she
