L 5 J 



would have been at the present moment had our pre- 

 decessors contented themselves in Bengal, as else- 

 where, with fixing the demand for periods of twenty 

 or thirty years. 



These extra millions would have made the adminis- 

 tration easy. We should never have heard of license 

 and income taxes, hateful to the country, however 

 equitable in theory ; famine expenditure would not, as 

 now, have involved proximate insolvency, and nine- 

 tenths of the fiscal measures of the last fifteen years, 

 which have created a more or less sore feeling in every 

 section and grade of the community, would have been 

 unnecessary. 



Had the country gained by it, we might derive some 

 consolation in looking back on this stupendous error. 

 But the result has been only to create a multitude of 

 absentee landlords and rent-charge holders, and to 

 leave the masses, except in particular localities,* 

 worse off and more miserable than those of any other 

 part of the empire. 



Again, throughout large tracts elsewhere, we have 

 created middlemen and converted into joint proprie- 

 tors with ourselves men formerly only representatives 

 of a community, men anciently only jprimi inter pares, 

 collecting for a small honorarium the dues of their 



less tlian 60 millions. Everybody ridiculed the idea, and many 

 excellent jokes were made at his expense, hut, three years later, 

 the first census was taken, and the population was proved to be 

 66 millions. 



* The Mahomedan cultivators of Eastern Bengal, whose turbu- 

 lent pugnacity has enabled them to hold their own to a certain 

 extent, must be excepted. 



