which we can properly follow. We must no longer continue to make good the deficit of each succeeding year by adding to the public debt. And we must determine, whatever be the difficulty of the task, that there shall henceforth be no room for doubt that, in time of peace, our income will always be in excess of our ordinary expenditure.'
I have mentioned the immediate measures by which Lord Mayo endeavoured to stay the impending deficit. But he felt that such measures strained the whole mechanism of the Government; that to stop public works on a sudden involved waste of material, while the increase of taxation during the current year disclosed in a most undesirable manner the shortcomings of our system, and might prove a cause of perilous discontent among the Indian people. 'We have played our last card,' he once said in conversation, 'and we have nothing left in our hands to fall back upon, except to devise measures which will prevent the recurrence of a similar crisis hereafter.' He accordingly resolved to find a permanent remedy, by removing the causes of the financial misfortunes in past years.
His reforms divide themselves into three branches. First, improvements in the mechanism of the Financial Department of the Supreme Government itself. Lord Mayo thought that it would be vain to ask the Local Governments to set their houses in order, if they could point to confusion or want of prevision in his own. Second, the more rigid enforcement on the Local Governments of economy in framing their
