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may be found in the Kangra Valley, to which I 

 have before alluded, where a few years ago, a British 

 settlement officer quietly made over the proprietory 

 rights of the State in 50,000 acres of laud that 

 would now be invaluable, to a few village commu- 

 nities without any stipulation whatever, simply, I 

 believe, because he did not know what to do with 

 them. There were no people to cultivate this 

 land; the village patriarchs could use compara- 

 tively 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 brother- 

 hood, will spend all the small resources of their 

 community in purchasing, at an enormous premium, 

 the smallest 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 farthing, from being cultivated, and thus 

 of depriving Government of the revenue it might 

 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 



