ON THE RECENT PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE IN INDIA. 537 



by the misrule of the mushroom Muhammadan governmerits that spi-ang' 

 up outside the spheres of influence of the Sikhs and Mahrattas in the 

 wide ruins left by the downfall of the Delhi Empire. The ei'uel and 

 grasping expedient of farming the revenues adopted by our unscrupulous 

 predecessors, and continued for a space by ourselves when we had not 

 the knowledge or experience to enable us to dispense with it, left us in 

 large jiroviiices a tangled web of tenures which we are only now getting 

 straiglat. Since 1880, when the Famine Commissioners submitted their 

 report, the whole law of landlord and tenant has been thoroughly recon. 

 sidered, both in the light of their recommendations and in accordance 

 with local needs and proposals, in Bengal, in the North-West Provinces, 

 in Ondh, in the Punjab, and in the Central Provinces ; that is, the best 

 efforts of the Government and of the most competent officials and other 

 persons whom it could consult have been given to the amelioration of 

 land tenure in the whole of Northern India, so far as it is British, from 

 the Himalaya to far below the Nerbudda and Tapti, and from Peshawar 

 almost to Manipur. In the same period the land revenue law, that is, 

 the law for the assessment and collection of the land revenue, vitally 

 affecting the economic conditions of the country, has been carefully 

 revised in the Central Provinces and the Punjab. How extensive and 

 how onerous these tasks have been few know besides those who have- 

 had to deal with them. To my mind they are, in their successful com- 

 pletion, agricultural improvements of the first consequence ; and nO' 

 economist can impute to the State misguided intervention here. N© 

 hand but that of the law could hold the balance between the conflicting 

 interests of those who draw their livelihood from the soil, and who have 

 learnt from our inevitable accentuation of individual right, derived from 

 Western theories of legal equality, to enforce, by legal processes, in 

 novel and powerful courts of justice, their antagonistic claims. Nor 

 could any authority but that of the State itself determine from time to 

 time the most suitable methods of assessing and collecting that public 

 demand, wholly unlike any impost in this country, which may, according 

 to our point of view, be described as a land-tax or a State rental. 



There was another set of proposals made by the Famine Commissioners 

 which has produced and is producing very important effects in India. 

 As they advised, the Eevenue and Agi'icultural Department of the 

 Supreme Government, which had been temporarily in abeyance, was 

 quickly revived. In all the great provinces officers have been appointed 

 under the designation of directors of land records and agriculture, or of 

 commissioners of settlements and agriculture, whose duty it is, under 

 the Local Governments and Administrations, to supervise the detailed 

 execution of that policy of agricultural inquiry upon which it was a main 

 object of the Famine Commissioners to insist. It is a recommendation 

 of that policy that it is founded on native institutions of great antiquity 

 and wide extent ; and it is only so far new that it utilises them for 

 beneficent purposes that were unknown to our predecessors, and too 

 little realised by ourselves, until the examination of the evidence con- 

 nected with a series of famines produced the abiding conviction that tbe 

 effort to prevent or circumscribe, or at least to mitigate, those disastrous 

 evils is amongst the first duties of the State in India. Wherever a just 

 and careful assessment of the land-revenue demand has been made in 

 temporarily settled districts, the basis of it has been sound agricultural 

 inquiry. Practically the Famine Commissioners may be said to have 



