200 



RESTRICTIONS ON THE ALIENATION OF LANDS. 



did not gain a footing for several years after the annexation of the 

 Province, but that, as land has increased in value and become more 

 attractive as a profitable investment, the number of transfers has in- 

 creased correspondingly and is still increasing. In a letter addressed 

 by the Punjab Government to the Government of India in 1888, 

 during the Lieutenant-Governorship of SIR JAMES LYALL, it was said 

 that ' after allowing for the greater accuracy of the statistics of later 

 years, SIR JAMES LYALL considers that the statements of sales and 

 mortgages from 1866 to 1886 show a large gradual increase in the 



O C5 O O 



area sold and mortgaged in" the Punjab/ and that, ( in both the east 

 and west of the province there are districts where the transfers to 

 money-lenders are serious and appear to be increasing and where the 

 fact requires Government to consider if a remedy cannot be found 

 and applied/ In the following year, His HONOUR the present Lieu te- 

 nant-Governor, then Financial Commissioner, recorded his opinion 

 that ' the only safe conclusion is that there is year by year a gradually 

 increasing amount of land being sold and mortgaged/ These opinions 

 have been confirmed as districts have come under settlement during 

 the past ten years, and the question of transfers has been specially 

 investigated by the Settlement Officers, while the enquiries made by 

 Mil. THORBURN in 1895, to which I have already alluded, showed that 

 in one out of the four circles with which he dealt, the amount of the 

 cultivated area which had been purchased or was held in usufructuary 

 mortgage by money-lenders was as much as 28 per cent., while in 

 another circle it was 20 per cent. These facts speak for themselves. 

 The Punjab is" pre-eminently a land of yeomen and peasant proprie- 

 tors, and the expropriation by the money-lending classes of these 

 sturdy land-holders men who furnish the flower of the Native Army 

 of India, and who look forward, amid all the hardships and glories 

 of a military career, to spend their declining years on their ancestral 

 acres has, under the influence of conditions which have sprung up 

 under British rule, been progressing, as I have shown, in different 

 degrees of rapidity in all parts of the Province. The sole and entire 

 object of the measure which I have been explaining is, while affording 

 ample facilities and a sufficient market for unobjectionable transfers, 

 to arrest the further progress of this mischief , and to check, by remedial 

 action, an ever-increasing political danger; and I venture to express 

 a confident hope that our scheme will be received in this spirit by 

 those in whose interests it has been devised. 



