INDIAN FAMINES - Institute for Social and Economic Change

128 A FEW GENERAL CRITICISMS.
she is the wiser for that experience. I have
already given and referred to the details which
I think will bear out this statement.
In famines, as in everything else, we require a
basis to work upon-thereon we improve. and
gradually we drop into the complex mechanism
of the all but perfect machine. Stephenson
made the first locomotive of practical use; he
was a great engineer, his name will be handed
down to posterity. and there will always be a
kind of instinctive reverence attached to his
name in the engineering profession. Yet compare
his engine with the locomotive of to-day.
It does not follow that because the several men
who have improved his ideas were more able,
or greater engineers than Stephenson. It is
experience which has suggested all that is new
and good: as a fault here is found out, it is
corrected-or as a want there is felt, it is supplied.
An appropriate commentary on this
point in connection with famines is the fact
that Sir G. Campbell has made a note in the
Appendix to the Report on the Orissa famine, of
the" change in the executive machinery of Bengal
suggested by the experience of the famine."