day. No Government can do more than spend the resources at its command, including the lives and energies of its officers, in relieving and feeding the people. This the Government of India has done and will do, and the British servants of the Crown have given themselves with a devotion beyond praise to the humane task.
If it is desired to prevent famines in such a country the remedy is either to supply the people with means of employment and livelihood other than the tilling of the soil, or to induce them to emigrate until the population falls to a number that the land under all circumstances can support. The latter remedy, which has worked automatically in Ireland, must be ruled out as impracticable in India. There remains the former. Have we done all that is possible in this direction? Technical education is talked of, and has to some extent been provided. No doubt it is a good and necessary thing. But works and manufactures on which the technically educated are to find employment must be provided. Capital will not come to a country to establish ironworks, to build mills, to introduce new industries, merely because a certain number of persons have received some education in these matters. Is there an example of a poor agricultural country succeeding in establishing its own manufactures and industries, in the face of the organized competition of richer and older nations, without a certain amount of Protection? The success with which cotton-mills have been established and worked in more than one industrial centre in India under absolutely Free-Trade conditions may be quoted against me. But, after all, they afford a mere drop of industrial employment in the ocean of agriculture.
I have no desire here to enter upon the vexed fiscal question. But it is my belief that famines will not be prevented until industrial employments have been provided for large numbers of the people; and the question whether this can be accomplished without a certain degree of Protection needs to be very seriously examined.
