India may almost be said to be a country of a single industry, that industry being agriculture. According to the census of 1901 two-thirds of the total population were employed in occupations connected with the land, while not one-tenth of that proportion were supported by any other single industry. The prosperity of agriculture therefore is of overwhelming importance to the people of India, and all other industries are only subsidiary to this main occupation. This excessive dependence upon a single industry, which is in its turn dependent upon the accident of the seasons, upon a favourable or unfavourable monsoon, has been held to be one of the main causes of the frequent famines which ravage India. _Agriculture._--The cultivation of the soil is the occupation of the Indian people in a sense which is difficult to realize in England, and which cannot be adequately expressed by figures. As the land tax forms the mainstay of the imperial revenue, so the ryot or cultivator constitutes the unit of the social system. The organized village community contains many other members besides the cultivators; but they all exist for his benefit, and all alike are directly maintained from the produce of the village fields. Even in considerable towns, the traders and handicraftsmen almost always possess plots of land of their own, on which they raise sufficient grain to supply their families with food. The operations of rural life are familiar to every class. They are enveloped in a cloud of religious sanctions, and serve to mark out by their recurring periods the annual round of common life. But though agriculture thus forms the staple industry of the country, its practice is pursued in different provinces with infinite variety of detail. Everywhere the same perpetual assiduity is found, but the inherited experience of generations has taught the cultivators to adapt their simple methods to differing circumstances. For irrigation, native patience and ingenuity have devised means which compare not unfavourably with the colossal projects of government. Manure is copiously applied to the more valuable crops whenever manure is available, its use being limited by poverty and not by ignorance. The rotation of crops is not adopted as a principle of cultivation; but in practice it is well known that a succession of exhausting crops cannot be taken in consecutive seasons from the same field, and the advantage of fallows is widely recognized. The periodicity of the seasons usually allows two, and sometimes three, harvests in the year, but not necessarily, nor indeed usually, from the same fields. For inexhaustible fertility, and for retentiveness of moisture in a dry year, no soil in the world can surpass the "black cotton-soil" of the Deccan. In the broad river basins the inundations deposit annually a fresh top-dressing of silt, thus superseding the necessity of manures.