While Lord Mayo thus provided for the wider instruction of the people of India, he also laboured to educate their rulers. At the time of his accession, the Government did not know the population of a single District of its most advanced Province, and the first census of Bengal (taken under Lord Mayo's orders) unexpectedly disclosed an extra population of { 182} twenty-six millions, whose existence had never been suspected, in that Lieutenant-Governorship alone.
No data were available up to that time for estimating the practical effects which any natural calamity would have upon a Bengal District. In 1866, when famine burst upon the Bengal seaboard, the Government remained unaware that the calamity was imminent until it had become irremediable, and scarcity had passed into starvation. The proportion which the crops of a Province bears to its food requirements, the movements of its internal or external trade, all the statistics of the operations by which wealth is distributed or amassed, and by which the necessities of one part of the country are redressed from the superfluities of another, remained unknown factors in administrative calculations of the most important practical sort.
Lord Mayo endeavoured to remedy this state of things by two distinct sets of operations. He organised a Statistical Survey of India, and he created a Department of Agriculture and Commerce. The first census of all India was taken under his orders. The Statistical Survey has produced a printed account of each district, town, and village, carefully compiled upon local inquiry, and disclosing the whole economic and social facts in the life of the people. He designed the Department of Agriculture and Commerce to perform for India the double set of duties discharged by the Board of Trade and the new (1891) Agricultural Department in England. The Government { 183} is the great landlord of India. It has not only to adjust its enormous rental so as to render it as little burdensome as possible to the people, but it has also to assist the people, by means of irrigation works and cash advances, in developing the resources of their fields. At the same time, it has to administer a vast area of State forests.