THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



419 



that of St. Paul's; tlie mosque to which it belongs is 450 

 feet in length and 1 50 in breadth ; while the Taj-Mahal of 

 Agra, the momnnent erected by the Emperor Jehangeer 

 over his wife, the " light of the Ilarem," built of the 

 purest white marble, and inlaid wilh the richest mosaic, 

 stands unrivalled among the mausoleums of the world. 

 These ingenious people were expert in the manufacture of 

 warlike weapons. We have alluded to their sword blades, 

 so admirably tempered, and so highly valued by Saracen 

 and Christian knights. The damask rifles are beautiful, 

 and ther3 are cannon at Moorshedabad, Dacia, and Agra 

 of prodigious dimensions. That at Agra is a brass fifteen- 

 hundred pounder, of twenty-three inches' bore. In astro- 

 nomy they were well versed ; for the Brahmins studied the 

 stars and calculated eclipses, and their equatorial instru- 

 ments were so colossal in size as to allow above three inches 

 and a-half to a degree, each degree being divided into 

 minutes ; the gnomons of the sun dials were from a hun- 

 dred to a hundred and twenty feet in length. These facts 

 alone refute the popular error, that the natives are a semi- 

 barbarous people. 



The division into castes has a powerful influence on the 

 social condition of Hindostan. According to the sacred 

 books of the Hindoos, there are four orders or castes, the 

 Brahmin, the Cshatriayas,the Vaisyas, and the Sudras. The 

 first proceeded from the mouth of Bralmia, the second from 

 his right arm, the third from his right thigh, and the fourth 

 from the soles of his feet. The Brahmin is of the priest- 

 hood, and Cshatriayas is the soldier; under the term 

 Vaisyas are comprehended the trading-classes and the 

 husbandmen, while the Sudras are the labourens. This 

 classification is hereditary. It is recorded in the code of 

 Menu, written about 1,500 years before the birth of Christ, 

 and from that time to the present its regulations have never 

 been infringed. 



From time immemorial Hindostan has been in a spe- 

 cial degree an agricultural country. The soil yielded 

 the great bu'k of the revenue, both under the Hindoo 

 and Mahomedan princes, and to this day three-fourths 

 of the public income received by the East India Com- 

 pany is derived from tlie same source. Under the native 

 sovereigns the superintendence of aqueducts, reservoirs, 

 and canals, applied to the purposes of irrigation, was 

 placed under a special department of the Government. 

 The cultivators gladly paid a water-rate which ensured 

 them copious harvests in the torrid regions of the sun, 

 and the tolls raised on a single canal are said to have 

 paid for the maintenance of twelve thousand horsemen. 

 Of the magnitude of these public works some idea may 

 be formed from the fact, well recorded, that the Empe- 

 ror Feroze constructed, about the year 1350, a magnifi- 

 cent canal, for the purposes of irrigation, from the base 

 of the mountains to the neighbourb'ood of Delhi, two 

 hundred miles in length, by means of which a vast tract 

 of country was made fertile as a garden, and above a 

 million of people provided with food. And yet nothing 

 is more true than that the rulers of ancient India never 

 held in proprietary right a single rood of ground, for 

 the whole belonged to the cultivators, there called Ryots. 

 According to the institutes of Menu, the legislator of 

 the Hindoos, who flourished fifteen years before the 

 christian era, " Cultivated land is the property of him 

 who cut away the wood, and who cleared or tilled it." 



The right to ownership of the soil is emphatically 

 described in the old laws " as the grass which cannot be 

 eradicated;" and tradition records the ancient adage, 

 " The Government is owner of the rent, but I am master 

 of the land." Nor was there anything arbitrary or un- 

 certain in estimating the rent ; it amounted to one-sixth 

 of the crop in time of peace, and to one-fourth in time 

 of war ; this scale was fixed in the code of Menu, and 

 thus deemed sacred and immutable by all classes. Such 

 was the general rule; but there were some slight varia- 

 tutes which however were based on equity. In the Insti- 

 tions, of Menu are these passages : '• Let the king oblige 

 traders to pay taxes on their saleable commodities ; of 

 grain an eighth part, a sixth, or a twelfth, according to 

 the difference of the soil and the labour necessary to 

 cultivate it." Again : " A military king who takes even 

 a fourth-part of the crops of his realm at a time of 

 urgent necessity, as of war or invasion, and protects his 

 people to the utmost of his power, commits no sin;" and 

 in another passage it is written: "The tax on the 

 mercantile class, which in times of prosperity must be 

 only a twelfth-part of their crops, may be an eighth, or 

 a sixth, which is a medium, or even a fourth, in great 

 public adversity." It is also stated in the law treatise 

 called the ' Ayeen Akbery :' "In former times the 

 monarchs or rajahs of Hindostan only exacted one-sixth 

 of the produce from the cultivators." 



When the Mogul conqueror Timour subdued Hindos- 

 tan he did not change this system, nor did his de- 

 scendants till the decline of the empire which he 

 had founded. Timour, in his Institutes, was only 

 anxious that all available soil should be cultivated. 

 " All deserted lands," so commanded that prince, " if 

 there be no owners to them, " shall be annexed to the 

 fisc (crown-lands) ; and if there be owners, and those 

 owners are reduced to distress, let the necessary sup- 

 plies be granted to them, that they may cultivate the 

 lands." We might look in vain for the same generous 

 spirit in modern Europe. These crown-lands, be it ob- 

 served, were only under the guardianship of the throne, 

 for neither kings nor emperors had any possessory title 

 to them ; and this is plain, from the following doctrines, 

 propounded by the Mahomedan jurists: " The land of 

 Irak is the property of the inhabitants. They may 

 alienate it by sale, and dispose of it as they please ; for, 

 when the Imaum conquers a country by force of arms, 

 and if he permit the inhabitants to remain on it, im- 

 posing the kheraj (a tax on infidels) on their lands, and 

 the juzzea (a capitation tax) on their heads, the land 

 is the property of the inhabitants ; and since it is their 

 property, it is lawful for them to sell it and dispose of it 

 as they choose." The law treatise (the Hedaya) de- 

 clares, that whosoever cultivates waste-lands does 

 thereby acquire the property of them. And a conquered 

 infidel, under the conditions just named, had the same 

 privilege. 



One of the earliest acts of the first King of Cashmere, 

 in the year a.d, 1326, was to confirm for ever the an- 

 cient land-tax, which amounted to 17 per cent., or 

 about one-sixth of the whole produce of the soil. It 

 appears, then, that the full possessory right and title to 



