more especially to the whole body of the law prescribed for the guidance of the revenue authorities, which is

throughout neglected, passed over in total silence, or shuffled over on all sorts or on no pretext, and every illegal interference and assumption of jurisdiction has been made without a check from the Board or the Commissioner, who has indeed been told by the Board not to interfere. I have in vain endeavoured hitherto to rouse the attention of my colleague and Government to this virtual abolition of all law. The respect of the native public

I know to have been shaken to an inexpressible degree; they can see facts, and are not blinded by the fallacious reasonings and misrepresentation with which the Board have clothed these subjects; and they wonder with amazement at the motives which can prompt the British Government to allow their own laws-all laws which give security to property-to be thus belied and set aside. All confidence in property or its rights is shaken, and the villainy which has been taught the people they will execute, and reward the Government tenfold into their own bosom.”

Such was the ruthless systematising, the contempt for all fact and law when they interfered with the application of a favourite nostrum, which turned the precious boon of Lord William Bentinck to the NorthWestern Provinces of India, the village settlement, into a curse to whole classes, to whole districts. Not without reason, surely, does the author of the pamphlet say, in reference to our long indomitable enemies of the present day :

"The talookdars of Oude have been lately often mentioned as disaffected. Whether they experienced or only anticipated the same dealings from our Government as the talookdars of the North-West Provinces of India received, they must have had a strong motive to dread our rule. The 'confiscation' which has been proclaimed against them-whether it really means confiscation or something else -could not be more effectually destructive to whatever rights they possessed than the disgraceful injustice by which the talookdars of the North-West Provinces were extinguished.”

· In connexion with this subject I may at once mention another, as to which I have not sufficient data to do more than simply indicate it. The right of primogeniture is one of those which, however unjust we may consider them in theory, may yet be most valuable to races placed in the exceptional position of being subject to foreign conquerors, who take no root in the soil, but only come to enrich themselves and depart. If once the worth of a native gentry to India under British rule is recognized, the most ardent partisan of equality may well admit, without compromising his principles, that the right of primogeniture is involved in the maintenance of that native gentry. And he will have the less difficulty in admitting its relative benefits, as the right is among the Hindoos confined apparently within very narrow limits.

Among Hindoos," writes Colonel Sleeman in his "Rambles," "both real and personal property is divided. equally among the sons, but a principality is among them considered as an exception to this rule; and every large estate, within which the proprietor holds criminal jurisdiction, and maintains a military establishment, is considered a principality. In such estates the law of primogeniture is always rigidly enforced, and the death of the prince scarcely ever involves a contest for power and dominion among his sons. In a great part of India the property or the lease of a village held in farm under Government was considered as a principality, and subject strictly to the same laws of primogeniture. . . . . In every part of the Saugur and Nerbudda territories, the law of primogeniture in such leases was in force when we took possession, and has been ever since preserved. The eldest of the sons that remain united with the father, at his death succeeds to the estate, and to the obligation of maintaining all the widows and orphan children of those of his brothers who remained united to the parent stock up to their death, all his unmarried sisters, and, above all, his mother. All his younger brothers aid him in the management, and are maintained by him till

they wish to separate, when a division of the stock takes place, and is adjusted by the elders of the village. The member who thus separates from the parent stock, from that time forfeits for ever all claims to support from the possessor of the ancestral estate, either for himself, his widow, or his orphan children."*

Now the invariable endeavour of the British Government has been to subject these large estates or talooks to the ordinary laws of inheritance, so as to subdivide them, and break down the great native families. It will be seen, from the passage which I shall presently quote, that Mr. Robertson, the Lieut.-Governor of the North-western Provinces, reckoned "the parcelling of talooks" as one member of a threefold agency under which "every trace of superior existing rank will disappear." And Sir Wm. Sleeman, it seems, had himself to resign the charge of the very territories above referred to (the Saugur and Nerbudda) on this account. "Had the Lieut.-Governor known more of the Saugur territories," he wrote to Sir Herbert Maddock (20th March, 1848), "when he wrote the paper on which Government is now acting, he would not, I think, have urged the introduction of the system which must end in minutely subdividing all leases." And what do we see now? that these territories, of which Sir Wm. Sleeman declared that "there is no part of India where our Government and character are so much beloved and respected," have been one of the chief seats of rebellion during the last twelvemonth. I have no personal information which would warrant me in asserting that the rebellion in this quarter arose from our tam

* Rambles and Recollections, vol. i. pp. 460-62.
+ Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, vol. i. p. xxix.

pering with the rights of property there, but the juxtaposition of the two facts is at least striking.

For the larger Indian landholder then, at least, even the vaunted revenue settlement of the North-West, the only one perhaps of all our fiscal measures which took its origin in an honest effort to adapt our system to the laws and customs of the natives, the facts and necessities of their daily life, was a sentence of ruin. When it is considered that the ryotwar settlement of Madras, professedly conceived from the point of view of benefit to the mere cultivator, had been carried out with far less regard even to the rights of other parties, it may easily be judged how far a similar class of men in native states to the talookdars of our North-West provinces must have looked with favour upon British annexation. I have already given reasons why their interests and those of the cultivators themselves should be less opposed in practice than they might seem at first sight. I shall have to revert to this subject.

LETTER XVIII.

THE EFFECT OF THE SALE LAWS.

"EVERY trace of superior existing rank will, I apprehend, disappear under the threefold agency of the parcelling of talooks, the resumption laws, and that late act regarding sales by which the Government has placed a restriction on the exercise of its own prerogative of mercy."

*Return on the Revenue Survey, India, 1853, p. 125. I have been unable, on a cursory survey, to recognize the exact provision to which

So wrote Mr. Robertson on the 15th of April, 1842. Let us examine this time the effects of the sale laws, to which he refers.

Mr. Martin Gubbins, who believes that our rule is popular in Oude, may surely be trusted when he bears witness to its defects. The following is a striking passage from his work:

"Our revenue system had in native estimation many faults. These chiefly consisted in the severity and lasting nature of the punishment with which we visited default. The landed property of a defaulter was liable to sale by public auction; and when thus sold, he lost for ever what had perhaps been the inheritance of many generations. A milder process was that of 'transfer,' by which a landholder lost possession of his estate, for periods varying from ten to fifteen years. Both of these processes were disliked; but the former is viewed by the land proprietors of Upper India, with a hatred and disgust almost equal to that which they feel towards our Civil Law Courts. The former penalty I have never enforced in my capacity as a revenue officer. And I hold it in almost equal detestation as the native land

Mr. Robertson refers, of the numerous acts relating to sales, among which may be enumerated Regulation I. of 1835, XII. of 1841, I. of 1845, and IV. of 1846. The second, latest at the date when Mr. Robertson wrote, is probably the one in question. But the " Acts of the Supreme Government of India" do indeed contain matter to startle a European reader. By sections 31 and 32 of Regulation I. of 1845, the default to make good a bid at a public sale by payment of deposit is made a contempt of Court, punishable by fine not exceeding 200 rupees (£20), or in default of payment, by imprisonment in the civil jail for not more than one month. I suppose that of all legislators that ever were, or ever will be, the Anglo-Indian is the only one that could ever dream of encouraging the sale of property by punishing with fine or imprisonment the dire offence of not holding to a bid, under the ludicrous misnomer of a contempt of Court.