24 THE OWNERSHIP OF LAND 



Even as late as 1820 this was still supposed to be 

 the official view. In a minute dated May 24, 1820, 

 Mr. J. Adam wrote : ' It is agreed on all hands, in this 

 country at least, and will not, I apprehend, be denied 

 by the Honourable Court, that the Government is 

 pledged, sooner or later, to impose a limitation on the 

 public demand from the land in the Ceded and Con- 

 quered Provinces.'* 



For the Indian tenants it was a fortunate accident 

 that the local officers, to whom the Commissioners 

 addressed themselves in 1807, did not believe that the 

 time had then come for making the settlement perma- 

 nent. Their grounds for this opinion were that the 

 country was at that time still very impoverished and 

 depopulated. There is abundant evidence that this 

 was the case. Almost all the early collectors deplore 

 the depopulation of their districts, and refer to ' ex- 

 tensive tracts of waste land.' Nothing has brought so 

 vividly before my own imagination the thinness of the 

 population in those days as an account given by an 

 English traveller in 1794 of his journey through a 

 country which I know well. This is how he describes 

 his ride from Koi'l (i.e., Aligarh) to Jalali, a townlet 

 some fifteen miles from Aligarh : 



'The country resumed its desolate appearance. It 

 was a flat waste abandoned entirely to Nature, no sign 

 of human industry being visible. All that broke the 

 uniform surface was a waving line traced faintly in 

 the sand by preceding travellers, who seemed to have 

 followed the footsteps of each other as I did theirs. 

 ... At five in the afternoon a village built upon a 

 sandy protuberance, which rose above the general 

 level, appeared before us towards the horizon.' f 



In the course of the last century the aspect of the 

 country has been entirely changed. At the present 



* ' Revenue Records of the North-Western Provinces, Allahabad,' 

 1818-1820, p. 202. 



•j- 'Travels in India One Hundred Years Ago,' Thomas Twining. 

 London : J. Osgood Mcllwaine and Co., 1893. 



