RISE OF PRICES 21 



greatly increased in far greater proportion than the mere 

 cost of transporting the produce from one part of India to 

 another. This specialization has already begun in parts of 

 India ; but there is room for very great progress in this 

 direction, and there are few things more profitable to which 

 the landlord can turn his attention than to discover those 

 crops which are particularly suitable to his locality and 

 to induce his tenants to take up their cultivation. 



An important economic force which affects the welfare 

 of both landlords and tenants in different ways is a change 

 of the general level of prices. The effects of a general 

 rise of prices such as we have recently experienced are 

 very complicated, but the main features are these. The 

 tenant who cultivates crops for sale should gain theoretically, 

 but actually he derives only a partial gain ; for much of 

 the benefit of the rise of prices is absorbed by intermediate 

 merchants and village money lenders. Such advantage as 

 has accrued to the tenants from the rise of prices during 

 the war has not lasted long enough permanently to raise 

 their standard of living, and the increase of population will 

 rapidly depress them to their old condition on the subsistence 

 minimum. The landlords have suffered by the rise of the 

 cost of living, because they could not increase their rents 

 to provide increased profits in proportion to the rise of the 

 cost of living. The latter has certainly risen fully 40 per 

 cent since 1915 ; but in this time the Oudh landlords 

 could only, according to law, increase their rents on the 

 average about 5 per cent, or their profits, assuming the 

 land revenue to remain unchanged, by about 10 per cent. 

 For this reason some of them have been forced to adopt 

 practices contravening the spirit of the law. 



When a general fall of prices comes, as it most come, 

 the events will not be merely reversed. The advan- 

 tages which it might be thought the tenant class had 



