Lord Mayo also found that the extravagance in Public Works was due in a large measure to the practice of constructing them out of borrowed money. He therefore laid down a strict rule that all ordinary works, that is works not of the nature of a reproductive nature, and paying interest, must be constructed out of current revenue. 'Any further increase to our debt,' he decisively wrote, 'cannot be made without incurring danger of the gravest kind. I will incur no responsibility of this sort, and nothing will tempt me to sanction in time of peace the addition of a rupee of debt for the purpose of meeting what is really ordinary and {175} unproductive expenditure. It is a policy which, acting on my own strong convictions, and in full concurrence with Her Majesty's Government, I am determined to reverse.' The long series of measures by which Lord Mayo reorganised the Public Works Department lie beyond the scope of this volume. It must suffice to say that by stringently applying his principles 'of first finding the money, and improved supervision,' he not only effected a large saving during his own Viceroyalty, but rendered possible the subsequent expansion of the Department without financial disaster to the country. Having thus reduced the expenditure to the utmost limit compatible with good work, Lord Mayo directed his earnest attention to the protection of the people against famine. He rejected at the outset a proposal which a Commission had made, of something very like a Poor Law for India. 'Having been engaged all my life in the administration of a Poor Law in one of the poorest countries in Europe, I may say ... first, that ordinary poverty in India does not need for its relief a poor-law system; secondly, that any sum which could be locally levied to relieve such famines as have from time to time occurred, would be ludicrously inadequate.' At the same time he solemnly accepted the responsibility of the British Government to prevent wholesale death from starvation. He believed, also, that the Government had in its hand the means for accomplishing this object. 'By the construction of railways and the completion of great works of irrigation,' runs {176} one of his earlier notes, 'we have it in our power, under God's blessing, to render impossible the return of those periodical famines which have disgraced our administration and cost an incredible amount of suffering, with the loss of many millions of lives.'