She was fully alive to the faults of manner which hindered the acceptance of his ideas, and from time to time she pleaded with him for more moderation and less asperity. She herself was sometimes blamed, by Mr. Jowett and others, for over-emphasis. She would laughingly wonder in reply what they thought of Sir Arthur Cotton who gave the public "strong alcohol," in comparison with which anything of hers was but "watered milk." She had not far pursued her researches into the Irrigation question before she perceived that it was intimately bound up with the Land question. Who was to pay for irrigation? Were the ryots willing to pay a water-rate? Could they pay it? Were not the Zemindars rapacious? Was not the cultivator at the mercy of the usurers? Sir George Campbell was full of such subjects, and Miss Nightingale proceeded, with his assistance, to master the intricacies of Land tenure in various parts of India, and especially of the "Permanent Settlement" in Bengal. One subject led her on to another, and she became deeply interested in the questions of representation, land, education, usury. She became, in short, an Indian Reformer, or an Indian Agitator, at large. V Her immediate effort, however, was thrown into the advocacy of Irrigation. In view alike of the poverty of India, and of the ever present danger of famine, she held that it was the duty of the Government to promote Irrigation in every way--by great works as well as small, by wells and tanks as much as by great and small canals--by encouraging private capital as well as by making great national grants and loans. The Indian tax-payer was poor, it was said to her; the way to make him less poor, she replied, was to irrigate his land.