For another, and an even more backward class, Lord Mayo showed an equal consideration. He perceived that the Poor White had become a grave administrative problem in India. The truth is, our whole system of State instruction in India had been designed, and rightly designed, for the Natives. The poorer classes of the European community were very inadequately provided for by the Government. Lord Mayo thought that the first thing to be done was to place the existing schools for European children on a sound and efficient basis before building new ones. I have already referred to the Commission of inquiry and reform which he appointed for the Lawrence Asylums. In the Presidency towns, he exerted his influence, to use his own words, 'to increase the means of instruction for the Christian poor, and especially of the class immediately above the poorest.' But his life was cut short before he could accomplish the object which he had at heart. While Lord Mayo thus provided for the wider instruction of the people of India, he also laboured to educate their rulers. At the time of his accession, the Government did not know the population of a single District of its most advanced Province, and the first census of Bengal (taken under Lord Mayo's orders) unexpectedly disclosed an extra population of {182} twenty-six millions, whose existence had never been suspected, in that Lieutenant-Governorship alone. No data were available up to that time for estimating the practical effects which any natural calamity would have upon a Bengal District. In 1866, when famine burst upon the Bengal seaboard, the Government remained unaware that the calamity was imminent until it had become irremediable, and scarcity had passed into starvation. The proportion which the crops of a Province bears to its food requirements, the movements of its internal or external trade, all the statistics of the operations by which wealth is distributed or amassed, and by which the necessities of one part of the country are redressed from the superfluities of another, remained unknown factors in administrative calculations of the most important practical sort.