When I started in Manjarabad, for instance, the planters relied solely on labour procured from the adjacent villages.

But now the local labourer is almost a thing of the past, for he has taken to agriculture and coffee culture, and now only occasionally works for a short time to earn some money to pay his taxes.

When this change began, the planters had of course to go further afield for labour, but merely to produce over again a similar result by enabling labourers from distant villages to do what the local labourers in the coffee districts had done, and thus for labour we have to operate on ever-widening circles, till at last I have heard it remarked that the Kanarese language is often of little use, and the native overseers on my estate have complained that they now often cannot make the labourers understand them.

And this of course is not surprising, as at one moment the overseer may have to deal with labourers from any one of the villages between Mysore and the Western Sea, and at another with people from villages in the Madras Presidency, far away on the route to the Bay of Bengal.

Field after field, and village after village, has thus been irrigated by that capital for which India thirsts, and which, as we have seen, produces such wide-spreading social effects on the welfare of the people, and, consequently, on the resources of the State--enabling land to be more largely and fully developed, wells to be dug, gardens to be made, and the people to pay with greater ease the demands of the Government.