RESTRICTIONS ON THE ALIENATION OF LANDS. 23 



for adoption those forms of mortgage which are believed to be least 

 harmful to the agricultural debtor ; and because some forms of mort- 

 gage and conditions of mortgages not recounted in the Bill may 

 nevertheless turn out to be innocuous, we have guarded the position 

 by enabling the Local Government to add to the forms of mortgage 

 and conditions so enumerated. This is one of the many precautions 

 we have taken to ensure that the Bill shall not jar with the common 

 customs of the peasantry. 



* 



Lastly, I wish to express my concurrence with some of the re- 

 marks of the HON'BLE THE NAWAB in regard to the trading classes 

 from whom most of the opposition to this measure proceeds. I agree 

 in the assertions made by him and in some of the papers connected 

 with this Bill as to the important and useful place which', the village 

 money-lender occupies in the agricultural system of the country. 

 I hope and indeed believe that the more enlightened members of the 

 trading classes, all of whom have benefited enormously by British 

 rule, will recognise that in the present legislation there is neither any 

 hostility to them nor any disregard of their just rights. We do not 

 indeed wish them to supplant the zarnindars, and so far as we can we 

 intend to prevent their doing so. But we mean that the zamindars 

 shall pay their just debts ; and I have heard to-day with much 

 satisfaction that measures are in contemplation which will enable men 

 of the trading classes, or indeed of any class, who hold decrees 

 in their hands, to get their money for them more easily than is often 

 the case now. I would repeat here the remark that I have made 

 elsewhere that a far-reaching measure of the present kind is the 

 more likely to succeed if it does injustice to nobody. It is not, in 

 my opinion, in any way unjust to the sowJcar. It leaves open a wide 

 field for the investment of capital in the customary way in mortgages 

 of a suitable description mortgages which do not need the sanction 

 of any revenue authority but are necessarily subject to the essential 

 condition that the mortgagor who is a member of an agricultural 

 tribe shall not be permanently dispossessed. Is it too much to ask 

 the sowJcar, who owes so much to law and order and improved 

 communications and the assistance of the courts, to be content without 

 the permanent possession of lands which are in the hands of their 

 ancestral proprietors a strength to the State, but would be in his 

 haTids a danger to himself, even sometimes as it is, and more certainly 

 and widely should the law and order on which his tenure depends be 



