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deal satisfactorily with them. /Aremarkable instance 

 of this may be found in the Kangra Valley, to which 

 I have before alluded, where a few years ag*o, a 

 British settlement officer quietly made over the pro- 

 prietary rights of the State in 50,000 acres of land 

 that would now be invaluable, to a few village com- 

 munities without any stipulation whatever, simply, 1 

 believe, because he did not know what to do with 

 them. There were no people to cultivate this land ; 

 the village patriarchs could use comparatively but a 

 very small portion of it for grazing their flocks , 

 and now Europeans, who would fill this beautiful 

 valley with industrious people, and enrich it with 

 wealth, are shut out of it, because they are not of 

 the Gens of the villager proprietors, who, sooner 

 than admit aliens within their brotherhood, will spend 

 all the small resources of their community in pur- 

 chasing*, at an enormous premium, any small plot 

 of land that, by accident, may come under the 

 Government hammer. For twenty years to come, 

 these villagers have been endowed with the power of 

 preventing thousands of acres of productive land, to 

 which they never had the shadow of a title, and for 

 which they do not pay, and never have paid a farth- 

 ing*, from being* cultivated, and thus of depriving 

 Government of the revenue it mig'ht derive from these 

 lands, or, in other words, of the means of making- 

 roads, bridges, &c., and otherwise improving the 

 property of the State. It is a singular fact too, 

 that while the acts of Her Majesty's and the Supreme 



