Towards democracy

472 Towards Democracy

A garden one might say—a land of rich and vecherché crops, of rice and tea and silk and sugar and cotton and oranges ,

Do you see it ?—stretching away endlessly over river-lines and Jakes, and the gentle undulations of the lowlands, and up the escarpments of the higher hills ;

The innumerable patchwork of cultivation—the poignant verdure of the young rice ; the sombre green of orange groves; the lines of tea-shrubs, well-hoed, and showing the bare earth beneath; the pollard mulberries; the plots of cotton and maize and wheat and yam and clover ;

The little brown and green-tiled cottages with spreading recurved eaves, the clumps of feathery bamboo, or of sugar-canes ;

The endless silver threads of irrigation-canals and ditches, skirting the hills for scores and hundreds of miles, tier above tier, and serpentining down to the lower slopes and plains—

The accumulated result, these, of centuries of mgenious industry, and of innumerable public and private benefactions, continued from age to age;

The grand canal of the Delta-plain extending, a thronged waterway, for six hundred miles, with sails of junks and bankside villages innumerable ;

The chain-pumps, worked by buffaloes or men, for throwing the water up slopes and hillsides, from ter to tier, from channel to channel ;

The endless rills and cascades flowing down again, into pockets and hollows of verdure, and on fields of steep and

plain ;

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