INDIAN FAMINES - Institute for Social and Economic Change

176 ADJlIlNISTRATIVE MANAGEMENT
line of railway, some 45 miles long, within
three months of its first proposal!
It is but fair, both for the object of these
pages as well as to the correspondent himself,
that retractions made should be recognised.
After noting several of the beliefs with which
he entered the famine campaign, he says: "I
wrote then honestly, according to my lights,
and according to my eager hopes; I must write
now, with equal honesty, a retmction of what I
then wrote. The belief has been crushed into
me by facts, that no organisation which any
Government could be expected to make could
avert considerable mortality in the time of
acute famine from a people with such characteristics
as those in whose midst I now am.
Talk of relief circles and sub - circles! - an
officer in every village would hardly avail to
prevent deaths by starvation. . . . What
can you do with people who will sit still and
starve in their hovels, when a grain-store is
open at the other end of their village? "
This admission, of an enemy, as it were, is
exoneration indeed. Had an Anglo-Indian so
written, it would have but merely added proo1