Page:Akbar and the Rise of the Mughal Empire.djvu/128

Rh that everywhere his rule was taking root in the hearts of the people. After the exchange of ideas with these noblemen, he pushed on to Ajmere, made his pilgrimage to the tomb of the saint, caused to be repressed the rising of a petty chief in the jungles of Jodhpur, and then returned to his favourite residence at Fatehpur-Síkrí.

He had noticed, on his many journeys, that a very great part of the territories he had traversed remained uncultivated. The evil was neither to be attributed to the nature of the soil, which was rich, nor to the laziness of the people. Sifting the matter to the bottom, Akbar came to the conclusion that the fault rather lay with the administration, which placed upon the land a tax which rendered cultivation prohibitive to the poor man. The evil, he thought, might be remedied if some plan could be devised for dividing the profits of the first year between the government and the cultivator. After a thorough examination of the whole question, he arranged that the several parganás, or subdivisions of the districts, should be examined, and that those subdivisions which contained so much land as, on cultivation, would yield ten million of tankás, should be divided off, and given in charge of an honest and intelligent officer who was