The Ganges has earned the reverence of the people by centuries of unfailing work done for them. She and her tributaries are the unwearied water-carriers for the denselypeopled provinces of Northern India, and the peasantry reverence the bountiful stream which fertilizes their fields and distributes their produce. None of the other rivers of India comes near to the Ganges in works of beneficence. The Brahmaputra and the Indus have longer streams, as measured by the geographer, but their upper courses lie beyond the great mountain wall in the unknown recesses of the Himalayas.

Not one of the rivers of Southern India is navigable in the proper sense. But in the north, the Ganges begins to distribute fertility by irrigation as soon as she reaches the plains, within 200 miles of her source, and at the same time her channel becomes in some sort navigable. Thenceforward she rolls majestically down to the sea in a beautiful stream, which never becomes a merely destructive torrent in the rains, and never dwindles away in the hottest summer. Tapped by canals, she distributes millions of cubic feet of water every hour in irrigation; but her diminished. volume is promptly recruited by great tributaries, and the wide area of her catchment basin renders her stream inexhaustible in the service of man. Embankments are in but

few places required to restrain her inundations, for the alluvial silt which she spills over her banks affords in most parts a top-dressing of inexhaustible fertility. If one crop be drowned by flood, the peasant comforts himself with the thought that the next crop from his silt-manured fields will abundantly requite him.

The Ganges has also played a preeminent part in the commercial development of Northern India. Until the

opening of the railway system, from 1855 to 1870, her magnificent stream formed almost the sole channel of traffic between upper India and the seaboard. The products not only of the river plains, but even the cotton of the Central Provinces, were formerly brought by this route to Calcutta. Notwithstanding the revolution caused by the railways, the heavier and more bulky staples are still conveyed by the river, and the Ganges may yet rank as one of the greatest waterways in the world.

The value of the upward and downward trade of the interior with Calcutta, by the Gangetic channels, may be taken at about 400,000,000 of rupees per annum, of which over 153,000,000 go by country-boats, and nearly 240,000,000 by steamers (1891). This is exclusive of the seaborne commerce. But the adjustments which have to be made are so numerous that the calculation is an intricate one. As far back as 1876, the number of cargo boats registered at Bámangháta, on one of the canals east of Calcutta, was 178,627; at Hugli, a river-side station on a single one of the many Gangetic mouths, 124,357; and at Patna, 550 miles from the mouth of the river, the number of cargo boats entered in the register was 61,571. The port of Calcutta is itself one of the world's greatest emporia for sea and river-borne commerce. Its total exports and imports landward and seaward amounted in 1881 to about 1,400,000,000 of rupees (Rx. 140,000,000) and to 1,523,000,000 of rupees (Rx. 152,363,583) in 1891.

Articles of European commerce, such as wheat, indigo, cotton, opium, and saltpetre, prefer the railway; so also do the imports of Manchester piece goods. But if we take into account the vast development in the export trade of oil-seeds, rice, etc., still carried by the river, and the grow

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ing interchange of food-grains between interior districts of the country, it seems probable that the actual amount of traffic on the Ganges has increased rather than diminished since the opening of the railways. At well-chosen points along her course, the iron lines touch the banks, and these river-side stations form centres for collecting and distributing the produce of the surrounding country. The Ganges, therefore, is not merely a rival, but a feeder of the railway. Her ancient cities, such as Allahábád, Benares, and Patna, have thus been able to preserve their former importance; while fishing villages like Sahibganj and Goalanda have been raised into thriving river marts.

For, unlike the Indus and the Brahmaputra, the Ganges is a river of great historic cities. Calcutta, Patna, and Benares are built on her banks; Agra and Delhi on those of her tributary, the Jumna; and Allahábád on the tongue of land where the two sister streams unite. Many millions of human beings live by commerce along her margin. Calcutta, with its suburbs on both sides of the river, contains a population of nearly a million. It has a municipal revenue of four and one-fourth millions of rupees; a seaborne and coasting commerce in 1891 of 770,000,000 of rupees, with a landward trade of over 750,000,000. These figures vary from year to year, but show a steady increase. Calcutta lies on the Hugli, the most westerly of the mouths by which the Ganges enters the sea. To the eastward stretches the delta, till it is hemmed in on the other side by the Meghná, the most easterly of the mouths of the Ganges. More accurately speaking, the Meghná is the vast estuary by which the combined waters of the Brahmaputra and Gangetic river-systems find their way into the Bay of Bengal.