During his sojourn in England he had been much impressed with the importance of sanitation or sanitary administration, as likely to become the pressing question of the immediate future. The insanitary condition of Indian cities had affected him in his younger days, and in later years his letters contain allusions to the subject. But something more than spasmodic effort was needed for that rectification which he would now make an imperial concern. To stimulate his recollections he would direct his morning rides to the unhealthiest parts of Calcutta, and one of his first measures after assuming the general government was to appoint a Sanitary Commission. But the principle of sanitation had in his mind a special application. He appears while in England to have been conferring with Florence Nightingale regarding military hospitals and the health of the European soldiery. Here, again, as a young man, he had grieved over the intemperance existing among these troops, and partly attributable to injudicious regulations which had been subsequently modified. The War of the Mutinies had brought home to his mind, with greater force than ever, the supreme value of these men to the Eastern empire. He then set himself to observe their barracks, and especially their hospitals, which he used to visit in times of epidemic sickness. He would now use all his might as Governor-General to give them spacious and salubrious barracks, suitable means for recreation, and other resources for the improvement of their condition. In former years he had witnessed the effects of drought upon districts destitute of artificial irrigation; and it was notorious that drought is the recurring plague not only of the continental climate of Mid-India, as physical geographers term it, but also of the southern peninsula. He had seen the inception of the Ganges canal, the queen of all canals ever undertaken in any age or country; and he would now stimulate the planning and executing of irrigation works great and small. For this, however, capital was needed, so his financial instinct warned him that the Government of India must cease constructing these necessary works out of revenue--a tardy and precarious process--but must open a capital account for the nation, whereby India might borrow money for reproductive works, on the principle which prevails in all progressive countries.