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prietary rights on the part of the landlord is set against the assertion 

 of strong customary privileges on the part of the tenant. If we were 

 to pursue the investigation further we should find equally suggestive 

 analogies. The bewildering multitude of tenures with local variations 

 of nomenclature and incidents finds its parallel in the multitude of 

 subordinate interests in land which are recorded in the Domesday 

 Survey, the English record of rights in the 11th century. Again it is 

 well known that there is no point in English legal history which is 

 more obscure than the question of extent to which and the circum- 

 stances under which alienation of land was legally recognised and 

 actually took place before the 13th century. But in the midst of this 

 obscurity, one fact is clearly established, viz., that such alienation as 

 took place assumed the form not of sale but of subinfeudation or sub- 

 letting, and the extent to which this sub-lotting was carried was 

 distasteful to the superior lords. We know that at the instance of the 

 great lords a famous statute was passed to stop sub-letting ; we know 

 that while the intention of the statute was to stop sub-letting, its 

 etfect was to legalize free sale, that it enabled the fee simple tenant to 

 alienate his interest without consulting his lord and that it has since 

 become the foundation of modern English law of the sale of land. If 

 there had been a Hansard in the days when the statute " Quia Emp- 

 tores " became law, he might pei'haps have supplied us with additional 

 arguments for and against the comparative merits and demerits of 

 sub-letting and free sale. 



'' However, I do not intend to weary the Council with any elabo- 

 rate historical disquisition. My object in touching on these analogies 

 between the past and the present is not to demonstrate — what has been 

 demonstrated to satiety — that the application of the modern English 

 landlord and tenant law to the relation of Zemindar and Ryot would 

 be both an anachronism and a political blunder ; but also to illustrate 

 some of the exceptional difficulties which suri'ound any attempt either 

 to declare or to amend the law bearing on those relations. For to say 

 that the Bengal ryot is still living in an age which to us Englishmen 

 has become an age of the past is to present only one side of the picture ; 

 there is another side to it. Side by side with the landlord who exer- 

 cises, and is content to exercise, his old customary rights so far as they 

 are compatible with the modern system of Government, we have the 

 auction purchaser who has bought his rights as a commercial specula- 

 tion, and thinks only how he can turn them to the best advantage. 

 Side by side with the hereditary tenant, cultivating and living on his 

 land, we have the enterprizing planter who has got his lease and wishes 

 to work it so as to extract from the land the greatest possible profit in 

 the smallest possible time. The modern theory of competitive rents 

 is jostling the old practice of customary rates ; the new fashion of 

 terminable leases is threatening to displace ancient occupancy rights. 

 The 13th century is being brought face to face with the 19th and is 

 striving with more or less success to understand and accommodate 

 itself to its ways. The cultivator for subsistence is giving way before 

 or developing into cultivator for profit ; those who have walked in the 

 dim twilight of custom are emerging into the hard and fierce glare of 

 law as administerd by the Courts. The ideas, habits and customs of 

 widely different ages and widely different civilizations are being thrown 

 into a common crucible and are assuming new and strange forms. We 



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