Florence Nightingale

“ If the screw turned too much brings fever, the screw turned just right brings plenty and health.
Let the people only see how much they can do for themselves in improving their surface drainage, in keeping their water supply free from pollution, in cleansing inside and out.
Let the Government see how much they can do for the people in introducing and stimulating better agriculture; irrigation, combined with drainage works in water-logged districts; for the two must never be separated there.
There is not a country in the world for which so much might be done as for India. ”

“ Is there anything to prevent the Government ordering at once the irrigation of from 250,000 to 500,000 acres in every district in India, including a complete network of steamboat canals of 20,000 or 30,000 miles, embracing all India, and to be completed in five years, with an absolute certainty of two or three times the present interest of money in direct returns? ”

“ Is it 'sound finance' to let a man starve a year hence, and live this year by eating up all he has?
Is it cheap to let him die, too dear to make him live, if you have to provide for his next year's food on borrowed capital, even if that capital returns cent. per cent. in future years; and even if—not borrowing it—you spend next year millions where you would only have had to spend thousands this year, besides the small item of a few hundreds of thousands of acres of depopulated country?
Is it cheaper to let a man 'get dead' than to feed him or house him, on borrowed capital? ”

“ On a former occasion I ventured imperfectly—for India is immense, while a paper is small—to bring before the Association how people have died, and not lived, in India; how people may live, and not die, in India. ”

“ Lord Mayo's Government was in favour of a compulsory rate in all irrigated districts.
Lord Northbrook and Sir G. Campbell are against it.
But, without it, it is said that irrigation and drainage (if the works are to be constructed by Government) can never be carried out on a scale commensurate with the wants of the country.
Is there much diversity of opinion, however, where the water is actually given? But then no compulsion is needed. Are not the people only too glad to get and pay for the water, as fast as they can prepare their fields and get manure? But are we not always in a hurry? ”

“ The crops were uncut. The dead lay about in the hollows, unburied and unburnt, for there was nobody left to bury them.
Where the people did live they degenerated mentally and physically.
The cause of all this was a screw turned by a coolie, which flooded the low lands from the Ganges canal faster than the water could be carried off. The man at the screw (at four rupees a month) ruled the destinies of a large population, not only as to health and life, but as to soul and mind, according as the screw turned to the right or to the left. ”

“ If we kept our turnpike road or bridge accounts in the same way, without reckoning consequences, should we not find that road-making and bridge-building was of all things the most fruitless application of public money, and that it was better finance to build houses and let them as gin-shops? ”

“ Till country drainage is introduced, till agriculture is improved, till irrigation and drainage are combined—both better when together, the first dangerous when apart—no great improvement in health, civilisation, or vigour of the people can be expected.
The 'drain' in another sense, the drain upon human life and happiness, of fever in India is literally untold. But as far as can be told—in 1871, a peculiarly healthy year, about one-and-a-half millions of people died in India from fever, or nearly 12 in every 1,000, or 23 times as many as cholera destroyed. ”

“ In permanently settled Bengal, the Government, in laying out money upon irrigation, is always said to be in the position of a man who, having given his property in lease for ever at a mere quit-rent, proceeds to lay out vast sums upon it. ”

“ It is 'unsound financialOr by loan? policy' to live unless you have money in your stocking; to borrow in order to build, or to trade, or to farm; you must not make railways except you can pay for them out of your income, nor telegraphs, nor any means of communication by steam or water?
Is not this reversing the whole principle which has given England her unparalleled success in trade and manufacture—her greatness, as a nation, over the whole globe?
Unless you have money in your stocking to do it, we say in India, don't do it; you must not utilise the money in your neighbour's stocking. ”

“ There is rarely fever in a village surrounded by rice swamp as long as the water is moving—'living,' as the natives say; the fever time begins when the water falls and stagnates.
Expense is the sole thing that stands in the way of all these improvements. As it is, our irrigation works in N. India are said barely to pay the interest on the outlay. Is this because we persist in debiting the works with the cost of all our blunders? Do we make a canal on a bad plan—twice as costly (say) as need be, and only half as useful—excluding navigation and cheap transit ”

“ This appalling famine speaks louder than any man can do—or woman either.
But one must live in order to be a subject for sanitary considerations at all; and one must eat to live. If one is killed off by famine, one certainly need not fear fever or cholera. ”

“ Every efficient labourer is a wealth-producing agent; and every efficient labourer, lost by death, is a pecuniary loss to the country.
These are truisms.
The people pay 21⁄2 rupees per head in taxes—the interest of 50 rupees, sufficient to irrigate 2 acres, which would support 5 people: and in actual famine 10 rupees would certainly provide food per head through the famine.
Scarcity and famine act in two ways; they reduce the wealth-producing power of survivors, and destroy the wealth-producing power of those who die. ”

“ In the great irrigated districts of the Godavery and Kistna in the northern part of Madras, and of the north-west provinces and Punjab, drainage is now being taken in hand on a great scale, as outbreaks of fever have shown the results of its neglect.
In Tanjore, south of Madras, where there are above 1,000,000 acres of irrigated rice, without a weed to be seen, the drainage is said to be of the rudest description, yet the health of the people good. The population is more than 700 per square mile in the Delta. But the climate is a dry one; not moist like that of Bengal. ”

“ All we can say is, we know into what dwellings cholera and fever will not come, however 'epidemic' the year; we can put towns and districts into such a state that the epidemic, like the mediæval witch, is exorcised, so that it cannot come near them. ”

“ It is impossible to regulate the drainage and water supply of vast tracts, like those in Bengal, except at an expense which cannot be met, it is said, by the mere receipts from irrigation, which (with navigation tolls in the canals) have hitherto been our sole source of profit. There is no question about returns, however, if the water is used; and, if it is not, it can only be from mismanagement, as in Orissa. ”

“ Should not the landowner be made liable by lawPractical solutions. to pay for all that is really done to improve the land or to save the lives of the people on it? Is not the real practical solution of the financial problem a scheme like that applied to Lancashire after the cotton famine—a fund administered by trustees who lend from it, on security of local revenues, for works of permanent value to the reproductive powers of the locality, the advances to be repaid by instalments from local revenue at such rates as shall extinguish the debt in a reasonable term of years? ”

“ People here will give their money and labour to make Railways and not to make Canals. Shall India wait till they get wiser, or let internal improvement, which depends so much on easy intercommunication, stand still till she has made them wiser? ”

“ Everywhere, however, water can be supplied for irrigation at a cost enormously below its value—the average cost of water in works on a large scale being about £2 per acre of rice.
Irrigation works are planned generally to supply one cubic foot per second to every 133 acres, which is the same as one cubic yard per acre per hour, or 1⁄5 inch in depth on the surface per day. Two-thirds of a cubic yard per hour for 100 days are given for wheat or other 'dry grain,' and two cubic yards per hour for 120 days for rice, including rain—i.e. 1⁄8 inch per day for dry grains and 3⁄8 for rice. ”

“ Such plans have been often laid before the Government of India; and, no doubt, some time will be adopted.
One effect of the famine may be predicted, and that is, that it will lead to a revolution in the Zemindarry system in Bengal; which, in its effects on the mass of the population, can be compared to one thing only, namely, the slavery system as it was in the United States.
Pecuniary loss in labourers' deaths exceeds cost of works.8. The wealth of an agricultural country is the result of labour; and, in a properly governed country, labour ought always to be producing wealth. ”

“ Nothing can be more just than a partial compulsory water-rate in the irrigated tracts, because, whether the people irrigate or not, they have the enormous benefits of navigation, drainage, drinking-water, forage, &c. Under the Orissa Works, at £3. 10s. per irrigable acre in cost of works, 23⁄4 rupees an acre would pay 8 per cent., leaving the transit free, and the increase of produce 15 rupees an acre at least.
The water-rate paid in Godavery on about 500,000 acres, at 4 rupees, is £200,000; but the increase of Revenue has been above £300,000. ”

“ When labourers die by thousands on account of famine and epidemics, because the ground on which they existed was left without irrigation and drainage, it may be affirmed with certainty that the pecuniary loss to the country exceeds what would have been the cost of works. ”

“ There is said to have been much, too, in our recent experience of irrigation in Bengal—chiefly the unwillingness of the people to take our canal water, except when driven to it by the failure of the rains—to cause the Government to pause before beginning new schemes, without some such guarantee for the repayment of the interest on the outlay as a compulsory rate would afford. ”

“ That the principle has long since been admitted that the cost of such works should not be borne by the existing generation, which has only a life interest in them, but in the shape of interest upon public loans by succeeding generations, which will equally benefit by them. ”

“ Then, a man who has once had a bad attack of malaria has it for life.
And almost all this fever is malarial.
Cholera destroys life, but does no more.
Fever destroys the life of the country; saps the world in which it is.
Look at the Burdwan fever; look at the Dengue fever.
'Dengue' is rarely fatal, but in its districts 'Dengue' is master, and 60 or 70 out of every 100 are 'down' with it!
Irrigation.Irrigation is essential in many parts of India, but irrigation with stagnant water is almost as injurious to crops as to health. ”

“ Then, population has increased to a degree that has raised the fear lest it may have outstripped the productive powers of the soil.
After at least half a million souls had (in the estimate of the present collector) been swept off by the fever in the Hooghly district, the population was still at the rate of 1,000 to the square mile.
But the productive powers of the soil under irrigation are enormous. One crop of rice without any manure at all will produce sufficient to feed a population of 2,000 per square mile. ”

“ Every village should have its pure water supply.Village water supply. The present state of the supply in Bengal is shocking beyond description. The water drunk by a large portion of India is utterly unfit for men's use, and is often brought from miles distant. Much might be done by the people themselves, under proper supervision, in the way of clearing out and deepening existing tanks. But this should be combined with a fresh water-supply from the great rivers by means of the subsidiary irrigation channels. ”

“ The disease death-rate of 1872, minus the superadded epidemic death-rate, was as low as that of 1871. But cholera intervened, and raised the death-rate materially in Bengal, though very little in Bombay and Madras.
This is no reason for discouragement, but the reverse.
It is not a defeat, but an attempt of the enemy to turn our flank.
We know enough of his strength and his arms to turn the check into a victory, if we are only wise. ”