In the territory contained in that map
alone, I have been at the trouble of reckoning the reservoirs, and they
amount to upwards of eleven hundred, from the extent of two or three
acres to five miles in circuit. From these reservoirs currents are
occasionally drawn over the fields, and these watercourses again call
for a considerable expense to keep them properly scoured and duly
levelled. Taking the district in that map as a measure, there cannot be
in the Carnatic and Tanjore fewer than ten thousand of these reservoirs
of the larger and middling dimensions, to say nothing of those for
domestic services, and the use of religious purification. These are not
the enterprises of your power, nor in a style of magnificence suited to
the taste of your minister. These are the monuments of real kings, who
were the fathers of their people,--testators to a posterity which they
embraced as their own. These are the grand sepulchres built by
ambition,--but by the ambition of an insatiable benevolence, which, not
contented with reigning in the dispensation of happiness during the
contracted term of human life, had strained, with all the reachings and
graspings of a vivacious mind, to extend the dominion of their bounty
beyond the limits of Nature, and to perpetuate themselves through
generations of generations, the guardians, the protectors, the
nourishers of mankind.
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