Sir M. E. Grant-Duff on Monday gave an address at
the Edinburgh Political Institution upon his experience in Madras. It was substantially that the thirty-one million people of the Presidency desired first of all more material comfort. They were eager for education, but on reading eighty-eight addresses presented to him from the representa- tives of the different classes, he found this was their steady drift. As 75 percent. of the whole population were agriculturists, improvement in agriculture should be first considered, and he instanced irrigation and the introduction of silos as certain to be beneficial. Silos, in particular, enable the people to preserve their cattle, which starve at the commencement of the rains, and die at the end of them of over-eating. (We should like to add, that the field for improving the cattle is almost limitless.) The people are all on the side of such im- provement, but the grand difficulty is this, that wherever improvement is effectual, the numbers are multiplied till congestion produces almost as much distress as insufficient crops. Sir M. Grant-Duff strongly deprecated the present native practice of subordinating all material, and, he might have added, social improvement, to political change. And he deprecated still more strongly the "generous folly" which can alone make sinister political proposals of any importance.
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