XXXll 



It may be said that this change has been brought about by the 

 invasion of Hyder ; by the four wars which have happened since that 

 event ; by Tippoo himself destroying many of the principal towns upon 

 the coast and forcing their inhabitants to remove to Jamalabad and 

 other unhealthy situations near the hills ; by his seizing in one night 

 all the Christians, men, women and children, amounting to above sixty 

 thousand, and sending them into captivity to Mysore, from whence 

 one-tenth of them never returned ; by the prohibition of foreign trade ; 

 and by the general corruptioD and disorder of his government in all its 

 departments. These circumstances certainly accelerated the change, 

 but taken altogether, they probably did not contribute to it so much as 

 the extraordinary augmentation of the land rent. 



A moderate land rent carries in itself such an active principle of 

 prosperity that it enables a country to resist for a long time all the 

 evils attending a bad government, and also to recover quickly from the 

 calamities of war. When it is fixed and light, the farmer sees that he 

 will reap the reward of his own industry ; the cheerful prospect of 

 improving his situation animates his labours, and enables him to 

 replace in a short time the losses he may have sustained from adverse 

 seasons, the devastations of war and other accidents. But when an 

 oppressive rent is superadded to all the other mischiefs of a tyrannical 

 Government, the country, however flourishing it may ever have been, 

 must sink under them at last, and must hasten to rain at a more rapid 

 pace every succeeding year. 



Hyder ruined Oanara, a highly improved country, filled with 

 industrious inhabitants enjoying a greater proportion of the produce of 

 the soil and being more comfortable than those of any province under 

 any native power in India; but instead of observing the wise and 

 temperate conduct which would have secured to it the enjoyment of 

 these advantages, he regarded it as a fund from which he might draw, 

 without limit, for the expenses of his military operations in other 

 quarters. The whole course of the administration of his deputies seems 

 to have been nothing but a series of experiments made for the purpose 

 of discovering the utmost extent to which the land rent could be 

 carried, or how much it was possible to extort from the farmer without 

 diminishing cultivation. The savings accumulated in better times 

 enabled the country to support for some years the pressure of conti- 

 nually increasing demands, but they could not do so for ever ; failures 

 and outstanding balances became frequent before his death. 



The same demand and worse management increased them in the 

 beginning of Tippoo's reign. He was determined to relinquish no 

 part of his father's revenue. He knew no way of making up for 

 failures, but by compelling one part of the ryots to pay for the 

 deficiencies of the other ; he made them pay not only for those which 

 arose upon the cultivation of the current year, but also for those which 

 arose from the waste lands of dead and deserted ryots which were 

 annually increasing. Severity and a certain degree of vigilance and 

 control in the early part of his government kept the collections for 

 sometime nearly at their former standard, buf it was impossible that 

 they could remain so long, for the amount of land left unoccupied 

 from the flight or death of its cultivators became at last so great that 

 it could not be discharged by the remaining part of the inhabitants ; 



