XXXVl 



revenue farmers with their followers, who paid themselves by per- 

 quisites and other indirect gains, but received very ti-ifling emolu- 

 ments from the treasury of the State. The next and an all-important 

 step in Anglo-Indian administration was to collect the land tax in 

 money instead of realizing it in kind, according to the practice which 

 had virtually, if not nominally, obtained to a great extent under 

 native rule. The immediate and inevitable consequence of this 

 general enforcement of money assessments was, that the amount of 

 coin, pi'eviously circulating and sufficient for the adjustment of the 

 limited transactions connected with revenue and commerce under the 

 native system, proved quite inadequate for the settlement without a 

 derangement of prices of the greatly enlarged transactions resulting 

 from the British system. Under the native system, the sale for cash 

 of a small part of the agricultural produce of a district sufficed to 

 provide for all its liabilities connected with taxation and commerce. 

 Under the British system, on the contrary, twice or, perhaps, three 

 times the quantity of produce had to be so sold in order to provide 

 for the same objects, owing to the whole amount of the land tax being 

 demanded in coin. But the supply of coin remaining as before, the 

 effect of this increased demand for it was of course to enhance its 

 price. The coin in circulation had to perform double or treble the 

 work it had accomplished before. The ryot requiring more cash to 

 pay his money assessment had, of course, to bring more produce to 

 market, which occasioned a glut and brought down prices. And this 

 state of things was aggravated by the demand for grain and forage 

 in the country markets being less than before, owing to the disband- 

 ing of the irregular force which had been kept up by the native 

 jaghirdars and other functionaries of the former Governments and to 

 the increased production due to an extension of cultivation by means 

 of these disbanded levies. Prices fell more and more until, in many 

 cases, our Collectors found it to be wholly impossible to collect the 

 full land assessment, and large remissions had to be annually made. 

 The village grain merchants, who are also the village bankers, 

 deprived of a sufficient market at their own doors, were compelled, in 

 order to find money to supply their constituents with, to seek more 

 distant markets for the disposal of the produce left upon their hands 

 in liquidation of advances previously made by them to the ryots. 

 This awakened a spirit of greater enterprise and activity among the 

 commercial classes, which was gradually communicated to the ryots, 

 and laid the germ of that active foreign trade which now advances 

 with gigantic strides, and has already penetrated into the remotest 

 recesses of the interior. This collateral benefit, conferred by the 

 British plan of administration, has fairly set free the spirit of pro- 

 gress long spell-bound in the native mind under the iron fetters of 

 Asiatic customs, far more than compensates India for the period of 

 suffering in which it originated. 



" The sufferings of the rural population during this transition 

 period were, without doubt, very severe. The revenue reports of our 

 Collectors in newly-acquired territories abound with harassing des- 

 criptions of the depressed condition of the agricultural classes, and 

 with representations of the difficulties they experienced in collecting 

 the land assessment, owing to the great fall in the prices of all des- 



