When I started my plantation in 1858, the pay of a labourer was 2 rupees 4 annas (4s. 6d.) a month. It is now, throughout the numerous plantations in Mysore, from six to seven rupees a month, and a labourer can live on about two rupees a month. Such a statement made of any country would indicate a satisfactory degree of progress; but whereas in England it would simply mean a greater ability in the working classes to live in an improved condition, and perhaps some improvement in the condition of the shopkeepers with whom they dealt, in India it means the creation of a social and ever wide-spreading revolution. For when in India capital is introduced, and employment on a large scale is afforded to the people, the poorer of the peasant classes are at once able to free themselves from debt, and the labourers soon save enough money to enable them to start in agriculture, coffee culture, or any culture within, their reach. The result of this, in my experience, has been most remarkable. When I started in Manjarabad, for instance, the planters relied solely on labour procured from the adjacent villages. But now the local labourer is almost a thing of the past, for he has taken to agriculture and coffee culture, and now only occasionally works for a short time to earn some money to pay his taxes. When this change began, the planters had of course to go further afield for labour, but merely to produce over again a similar result by enabling labourers from distant villages to do what the local labourers in the coffee districts had done, and thus for labour we have to operate on ever-widening circles, till at last I have heard it remarked that the Kanarese language is often of little use, and the native overseers on my estate have complained that they now often cannot make the labourers understand them. And this of course is not surprising, as at one moment the overseer may have to deal with labourers from any one of the villages between Mysore and the Western Sea, and at another with people from villages in the Madras Presidency, far away on the route to the Bay of Bengal. Field after field, and village after village, has thus been irrigated by that capital for which India thirsts, and which, as we have seen, produces such wide-spreading social effects on the welfare of the people, and, consequently, on the resources of the State--enabling land to be more largely and fully developed, wells to be dug, gardens to be made, and the people to pay with greater ease the demands of the Government. But there is yet another point of great importance to notice as regards the introduction into India of European capital, with its accompanying effects--effects which largely enhance its value--namely, those arising from setting the natives practical examples of both method, skill, and energetic action. I allude to the bearing of these forces upon famine--a subject well worthy of some passing remarks, more especially because in