5 OCTOBER 1901, Page 50

GENERAL SIR ARTHUR COTTON.

General Sir Arthur Cotton. By hIs Daughter, Lady Hope. (Hodder and Stoughton. 12s. net.)—Sir Arthur Cotton may not have been what his biographer, with filial enthusiasm, styles him, "the greatest benefactor of British birth the Indian people have ever known," but the story of his simple, strenuous life, which lasted for nearly the whole of the last century, and of his irrigation schemes in India well merited being told. Thus the fourteenth chapter, which is happily brief, is a remarkable record of practically beneficent work for India. But it is greatly to be regretted that Lady Hope and her assistants had not kept their story within short compass, instead of producing a volume of nearly six hundred pages, and containing a number of speeches and papers which are necessarily of slight and ephemeral value. Even yet this condensation might be effected. A Life of, say, the length of one of the volumes in the "English Men of Letters" series would be a distinct boon to India and to Anglo-Indians.