RELIEF OF INDEBTED AGRICULTURISTS. 141 



So far from eagerly getting the land formally transferred to their 

 own names, they show general reluctance to do so. They prefer to 

 keep the ryot on his land, and extract all they can from him : the 

 punctual discharge of their advances is the last thing they desire. 

 As MR. AUCKLAND COLVIN says, 



' the position is that of a man recorded as occupier of his holding, and responsible 

 for the payment of revenue assessed on it ; but virtually reduced by pressure of debt 

 to a tenant-at-\vill, holding at a rack-rent from, and sweated by, his Marwari 

 creditor. It is in that creditor's power to eject him any day by putting in force any 

 one of the decrees he has against him ; and if allowed to hold on, it is only on condi- 

 tion of paying over to his creditor all the produce of his land not absolutely necessary 

 for next year's seed-grain, or for the support of life. * * * * He has nothing to 

 hope for,, but lives in daily fear of the final catastrophe. Under a so-called ryotwari 

 settlement it is gradually coming to this, that the ryot is the tenant, and the Marwari 

 is the proprietor. * * * * The proprietor is irresponsible ; the tenant unpro- 

 tected. It promises to become, not a ryotwari, but a Marwari, settlement." 



Such conditions deprive the transfer of land from distressed to 

 monied classes of all the glamour with which political economy 

 would surround it. They show that the noble gift of property in 

 land, made by the British Government to the peasantry for their sole 

 benefit, is passing, contrary to their intentions, and in frustration 

 of their objects, to a class unfitted to possess it. As observed 

 as early as 1852 by SIR GEORGE WINGATE, the great author 

 of the gift : 



" It was never contemplated that the measures intended to secure these benefits 

 for the class of landholders should transfer their dearest rights and the possessions 

 that had descended to them from their forefathers to a class of usurious money- 

 lenders, and degrade the former to the position of labourers or of tenants cultivating 

 their former lands at the will of the latter. 



In short, the second of the premises on which a policy of laissez 

 faire would rest is as unsound as the first. In the words of Mil. 

 PEDDER, a gentleman who has long made a special sudy of this subject, 

 * * * 'it cannot be too clearly understood that only in the dream 

 of a visionary will the English agricultural system of large landlords, 

 capitalist farmers of large farms, and peasant-labourers for wage, 

 ever be substituted for the petite culture of India. Happen what will, 

 each ryot will till his petty holding ; but he may be, as we have made 

 him in Bombay, its proprietor ; he may be, as in the North- West, a 

 member of a proprietary cultivating community; he may be, as in 

 Rajputana, the customary tenant of an hereditary lord ; or, he may be, 

 as I fear he is becoming, the praedial serf of a money-lender.' 



