IX 



to spend than we have, so they practically took eight times more from 

 the people. That is to say, their revenue represented eight times the 

 quantity of the staple food of the province which our own revenue 

 represents. 



The truth is, that a whole series of intermediate rights has grown 

 up between the ruling power and the soil. I shall show in the next 

 volume how the native kings of Orissa enjoyed the undivided owner- 

 ship of the land. Instead of a long line of part-proprietors stretching 

 from the Crown to the cultivator, as at present, and each with a 

 separate degree of interest in the soil, the jihtium dominimn was 

 firmly bound up and centred in the hands of the Prince. The growth 

 of these intermediate rights forms the most conspicuous phenomenon 

 in the history of Orissa under its foreign conquerors. For centuries, 

 under the Musalmdns and Mahrattas, the unha^Dpy province knew no 

 Government but that of the sword ; yet the very roughness of the 

 public administration allowed private rights to spring up unperceived, 

 and to harden into permanent charges upon the soil — charges which 

 its native Princes would never have tolerated. Thus from long anarchy 

 and misery a fair growth of rights has blossomed forth, and the 

 magnificence, which the Hindu Princes of Orissa concentrated upon 

 themselves, is now distributed in the form of moderate prosperity 

 among a long-descending chain of proprietors, each with his own set 

 of rights in the land. 



It is to such miscellaneous imposts as the stamp revenue and salt 

 tax that the British Government of India has to look for the means 

 of carrying on the administration. The native dynasties trusted 

 almost entirely to the land revenue. They managed to raise an annual 

 income variously stated at from £406,250 to £570,750, or say 

 £450,000 a year, between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries. 

 This almost exactly corresponds, in figures, to the total revenue 

 which, by a great machinery of miscellaneous imposts, we now collect 

 from the province. In actual purchasing power, it amounted to seven 

 times our present revenue, and supported the magnificence of a Hindu 

 Court, with a standing army, an opulent hierarchy, and a costly civil 

 list. Under British rule, the Orissa revenue barely sufiices for the 

 charges of the local administration. 



Had we dealt with the land as the Native rulers did, and con- 

 sidered it the inalienable property of the State, the land-tax might 

 possibly still bave sufficed. But under our more liberal policy of deve- 

 loping private rights in the soil at the expense of the public burdens 

 upon it, the land-tax has become wholly inadequate to the cost of 

 Government. In 1829 — 30, the land revenue of Orissa amounted to 

 £158,965. In 1836 — 37, the Government leased out the province for 

 thirty years ; and in 1867 the Legislature renewed that settlement for 

 another period of thirty years. It now amounts to £168,286, and no 

 further increase can be hoped for till the end of the century. Mean- 

 while, the bare cost of Local Government amounts to £422,000 a 

 year ; and before the end of the century it will in all probability 

 exceed half 9. million. Before the expiry of the present leases, the 

 land-tax will yield less than one-third of the merely local expenditure. 



