The Deccan Ryots Relief Bill, according to the summary given by Mr. Hope, secures

(1) Precautions against fraud.

(2) The interposition of friendly conciliation between disputants previous to litigation.

(3) The approximation of courts to homes of the people.

(4) Simplification of procedure and diminution of expenses and technicalities.

(5) Equitable jurisdiction.

(6) Finality of judicial decisions.

(7) Prompt enforcement of decrees.
(8) Discharge of the debtor.

As cheap and easy justice has often been put forward as one of the advantages of English rule, it is well to listen to the opinion of the Deccan Riots Commission on this point: There is another cause which requires mention here as tending to make the action of the courts oppressive to debtors, namely, the high costs of suits. The costs of suits fall upon the debtors, and so long as they do not exceed the actual cost of the litigation of which the debtors are the cause, the charge is fair. But the income from the 88 subordinate courts last year was Rs. 16.89.744; while the expenditure on the courts, including the salaries of judges and all officers attached to the courts, was only Rs. 6.90.717. These courts thus yielded a net revenue of nearly ten lakhs of rupees. It is impossible to ascertain precisely how much of this surplus is absorbed in the support of the Appellate Courts. But we need not say that the object of courts

is not to yield a revenue, and it is plainly proper that any surplus that may be derived from them should be devoted to improving the administration of justice in them, and not to any other object. There appears reason to think that some of the miscellaneous court chargessuch as fees for copying, costs in execution and attachment processes and the like-are unduly burdensome, and if this is the case they should be reduced.'

The Bombay High Court must have a very easy time, considering the number of its judges. The Punjab, with a population of seventeen millions, has only a Judicial Commissioner to constitute a High Court of Appeal; Bombay, with sixteen millions, has eight judges. Allowance being made for Bombay itself, it is difficult to see how there can be work for so many. As a fact, I found on inquiry at the court that off-days are very numerous. The Calcutta High Court has only eleven judges, and yet the population of Bengal and Assam is between sixty and seventy millions. Now that the Deccan Ryots Relief Bill has cut down some of the appellate work, there is still more reason for retrenchment in the outlay on the High Court.

APPENDIX IX.

Speaking very broadly, it may be said that we found in Hindu law two leading principles, by no means easy to reconcile, but which the Hindus seem in practice to have reconciled one, family or hereditary responsibility for debt; the other, the inalienability of family property, especially of land; in other words (again speaking broadly, for of course the Hindu law of inheritance and

the English law of entail have nothing but a result in common), a general law of entail. Our courts-not apt at reconciling opposed principles, and guided by English notions of justice-have in effect fully carried out the first of these principles and have superseded the second, and Hindu estates in land are therefore exposed to the dangers of the one and have lost the safeguard of the other.

'It may, of course, be said that this result was to be desired; that in England it has now been decided that the freest possible transfer of land is beneficial. But India is not England. In England a constant interchange of classes is going on. Partly from the love of the country, and of rural pursuits, which seems to be innate in the people; partly from the social consideration and political influence which the ownership of land gives; the ambition of the successful man of business is to found and to reside on an estate, and his energy, wealth, and intelligence often make him a better landlord than the man from whom he acquires it; while there are many trades and professions to which the family of the ruined landowner can betake themselves for support, and with fair prospects of success. In India it is not so. The landowner who has lost his estate sinks into abject poverty, embittered by the memory of the position he has lost, and, if a man of energy or influence, becomes politically dangerous. We know what discontent transfer of the rights of landowners to their tenants caused in Hindustan how much greater is discontent likely to be where the change of ownership injures instead of benefiting the cultivator? The money-lender, on the other hand, who acquires the estate, though he likes the possession of land well enough, has no idea beyond that of getting all he can out of it, and would shrink with horror from the

K

;

notion of leaving the town life, the society of his castefellows, the business habits, and the round of petty gains to which he is accustomed in order to reside in solitary dignity in a remote village. Money-grubbing is the life of these people; to drive sharp bargains is their pleasure and glory; public opinion-except that of their own class, which is that to make money any how is creditable and that the mode in which it is made is amply atoned for by some act of showy liberality-has no influence over them; and they treat their tenants without scruple or remorse as they treat their debtors, as persons whom Providence and the Sarkar have delivered into their hands.

'As regards the peasant proprietors of Bombay, there are other noteworthy considerations.

'Speaking generally, when British rule succeeded, to that of the Mahrattas in the Bombay Presidency, the land was the property of the State; the cultivators were tenants of Government, and very generally tenants-atwill. The British Government has deliberately divested itself of the ownership of the soil, and has transferred it to its tenants, in order to raise the status of the great and important cultivating class; to improve by the 'magic of property' the wretched Indian husbandry; to confer on the country generally the advantages which economists believe to attend the system of peasant proprietorship.* It is surely intolerable that this measure-one, I believe, of the wisest and most successful ever carried out by an Indian Government-should be rendered nugatory by the diversion to another class, totally unconnected with the

* The Bombay ryot with an erratic land-tax is not at all a peasant proprietor, A permanent settlement made with the cultivators has yet to be tried in India.

soil, of the gift which Government made to the cultivators, and that the latter, instead of being, as they were meant to be, owners of their holding, subject to a moderate and fixed assessment, or, as they were, tenants of a Government who at least endeavoured to act towards them with justice and liberality, should become cottier tenants-atwill, or something lower, of hard and grasping landlords.

'For it cannot be too clearly understood that only in the dream of a visionary will the English agricultural system of large landlords, capitalists, farmers of large farms, and peasant labourers for wage, ever be substituted for the petite culture of India. Happen what will, each ryot will till his petty holding, but he may be, as we have made him in Bombay, its proprietor; he may be, as in the North-West, a member of a proprietary cultivating community; he may be, as in Rajputana, the customary tenant of an hereditary lord; or he may be, as I fear he is becoming, the predial serf of a money-lender. That the operations of the civil courts are now assisting this result may be judged of by the fact that there were in 1872 over 18,000 sales of immoveable property (lands and houses) in execution of decrees in the Regulation Districts of Bombay against less than 6,000 of moveable property.'

Quoted by the Deccan Commission from a pamphlet by Mr. Pedder, late of the Bombay Civil Service, and now Secretary of the Revenue Department in the India Office.