58 BRITISH INDIA - AGRICULTURAL ECONOMV IN GEKEliAL 



not exist, and in fact could have no real existence. The threat to the in- 

 tegrity of the indigenous land tenures came not from any action on their 

 part but from economic and legal causes. 



The early administrators of the Panjab had sufficient statemanship 

 to see how essential it was that a foreign government should maintain the 

 framework of society which it found in being. But they could not but 

 be affected by the exaggerated individualism which marked the economic 

 theories prevalent in the middle of the I gth century, and by the notion that 

 agricultural advance depended on the attraction of fresh capital to the bu- 

 siness of tillage. Accordingly we find a very distinguished ofiiicer, who be- 

 came the second lyieutenant Governor of the province, apologizing for the 

 giving of legal force to a village custom of pre-emption, which was designed 

 to prevent the intrusion of strangers into the communal landholding com- 

 mtmity. Still stranger is it to read in an early manual for the guidance 

 of officials that the author contemplated without regret "a gradual process" 

 by which the existing village communities might " melt away and give 

 place to a more modern and perhaps more politically nice distribution of 

 property ". 



For the next twenty years everything tended to break up the old or- 

 der. The mere advent of a strong Government affording equal protection 

 and equal justice to all made th^ individual landholder less dependent 

 on the support of his agnates and of the village community. The multi- 

 plication of courts of law and of an inferior type of lawyer among a people 

 naturally quarrelsome and litigious inevitably sapped the influence 

 of the village councils, which for pratical purposes gradually faded out of 

 existence. A cash assessment distributed for a long term of y^ears over 

 holdings created^a state of things in which communal responsibility for the 

 revenue demand was rarely intruded on the attention of the individual 

 landholder. The moderation of the State's revenue or rent, and the se- 

 curity of title given by an authoritative record, meant for the peasant pro- 

 prietor a great inflation of credit. His old plan of limited borrowing on the 

 pledge of crops, cattle, or jewellery, was replaced by extravagant borrow- 

 ing on the security of the land. Sales and mortagages to moneylenders 

 became a common and increasing featureof village life, and the right of the 

 next heirs to object fell practically into abeyance. The officiaT attitude 

 for some time was apathetic. Shortsightedness masquerading as common 

 sense was not alarmed, and talked of the investment of capital in the soil. 

 Even among those who viewed the growing disappropriation of the pea- 

 santry with misgivings, there was a disposition to regard the process as 

 the inevitable result of economic laws, and to hope that it would not go too 

 far. But, as each quinquennium showed that the hope was vain, opinion 

 changed. The social and political evils of a landless peasantry came to 

 be recognized. The belief that the maxims of western political economists, 

 as laid down in the middle of last century, could be applied to every country 

 and stage of society was shaken. Experience showed that the capitalist 

 landholder in Indi%was as a rule nothing but a rent-receiver. The inter- 

 est in primitive institutions aroused by the works of Sir Henry Summer 



