Lord Mayo endeavoured to remedy this state of things by two distinct sets of operations. He organised a Statistical Survey of India, and he created a Department of Agriculture and Commerce. The first census of all India was taken under his orders. The Statistical Survey has produced a printed account of each district, town, and village, carefully compiled upon local inquiry, and disclosing the whole economic and social facts in the life of the people. He designed the Department of Agriculture and Commerce to perform for India the double set of duties discharged by the Board of Trade and the new (1891) Agricultural Department in England. The Government {183} is the great landlord of India. It has not only to adjust its enormous rental so as to render it as little burdensome as possible to the people, but it has also to assist the people, by means of irrigation works and cash advances, in developing the resources of their fields. At the same time, it has to administer a vast area of State forests. Lord Mayo, in inaugurating an Agricultural Department, clearly laid down the limits within which the Department could profitably act. He realised the folly of imagining that we can teach the Indian husbandman his own trade by means of steam-ploughs and 'ammoniac manures.' 'I do not know,' he once wrote, 'what is precisely meant by "ammoniac manure." If it means guano, superphosphate, or any artificial product of that kind, we might as well ask the people of India to manure their ground with champagne.' In another of his Viceregal notes he puts the case thus: 'In connection with agriculture we must be careful of two things. First, we must not ostentatiously tell Native husbandmen to do things which they have been doing for centuries. Second, we must not tell them to do things which they can't do, and have no means of doing. In either case they will laugh at us, and they will learn to disregard really useful advice when it is given.' Lord Mayo was deeply convinced that the permanent amelioration of the lot of the Indian people must rest with themselves. He looked forward to the time when municipal administration would largely {184} aid the officials by means of local self-government. Nor did he shrink from the responsibilities which the creation of such institutions involved. 'We have lately inaugurated,' he said to his Legislative Council, 'a system of lending to Municipalities which we believe will contribute much to the health, wealth, and comfort of the inhabitants of towns.' He publicly declared the development of municipal government to be among the chief of the many great services which Sir Donald Macleod, as Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, had rendered to India.