Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/794

770 70 INDIA [ADMIN IST RATIOY. the petty corporation ; the revenue was not due from indi viduals, but from the community represented by its head man. The aggregate harvest of the village fields was thrown into a common fund, and before the general distribution the head-man was bound to set aside the share of the state. No other system of taxation could be theoretically more just, or in practice less obnoxious to the people. Such is an outline of the land system as it may be found at the present day throughout large portions of India both under British and native rule ; and such we may fancy it to have been universally before the Mahometan conquest. The Musalmans brought with them the avarice of conqueror?, and a stringent system of revenue collection. Under the Mughal empire, as organized by Akbar the Great, the share of the state was fixed at one-third of the gross produce of the soil ; and a regular army of tax-collectors was permitted to intervene between the cultivator and the supreme govern ment. The entire vocabulary of the present land system is borrowed from the Mughal administration. Th& zaminddr himself is a creation of the Mahometans, unknown to the early Hindu system. He was originally a mere tax- collector, or farmer of the land revenue, who agreed to furnish a lump sum from the tract of country assigned to him. If the Hindu village system may be praised for its justice, the Mughal farming system had at least the merit of efficiency. Shah Jahau and Aurangzeb extracted a larger land revenue than the British do. When the government was first undertaken by the East India Com pany, no attempt was made to understand the social system upon which the land revenue was based. The zaminddr was conspicuous and useful ; the village com munity and the cultivating rdyat did not force them selves into notice. The zaminddr seemed a solvent person, capable of keeping a contract ; and his official position as tax-collector was confused with the proprietary rights of an English landlord. The superior stability of the village system was overlooked, and in the old provinces of Bengal and Madras the village organization has gradu ally been suffered to fall into decay. The consistent aim of the British authorities has been to establish private pro perty in the soil, so far as is consistent with the punctual payment of the revenue. The annual Government demand, like the succession duty in England, is universally the first liability on the land ; when that is satisfied, the registered landholder has powers of sale or mortgage scarcely more re stricted than those of a tenant in fee-simple. At the same time the possible hardships, as regards the cultivator, of this absolute right of property vested in the owner have been anticipated by the recognition of occupancy rights or fixity of tenure, under certain conditions. Legal rights are everywhere taking the place of unwritten customs. Land, which was before merely a source of livelihood to the cultivator and of revenue to the state, has now become the subject of commercial speculation. The fixing of the revenue demand has conferred upon the owner a credit which he never before possessed, by allowing him a certain share of the unearned increment. This credit he may use improvidently, but none the less has the land system of India been raised from a lower to a higher stage of civiliz ation. The means by which the land revenue is assessed is known as settlement, and the assessor is styled a settlement officer. In Ben gal the assessment has been accomplished once and for all, but throughout the greater part of the rest of India the process is con tinually going on. The details vary in the different provinces ; but, broadly sneaking, a settlement may be described as the ascertain ment of the agricultural capacity of the land. Prior to the settle ment is the work of survey, which first determines the area of every village and frequently of every field also. Then comes the settle ment officer, whose duty it is to estimate the character of the soil, the kind of crop, the opportunities for irrigation, the means of com munication and their probable development in the future, and all other circumstances which tend to affect the value of the produce. With these facts before him, he proceeds to assess the Government demand upon the land according to certain general principles, which may vary in the several provinces. The final result is a settlement report, which records, as in a Domesday Book, the en tire mass of agricultural statistics concerning the district. Lower Bengal and a few adjoining districts of the North- Western Provinces and of Madras have a perma nent settlement, i.e., the land revenue has been fixed in perpetuity. When the Company obtained the diwdni or financial administration of Bengal in 1765, the theory of a settlement, as described above, was unknown. The exist ing Mahometan system was adopted in its entirety. En gagements, sometimes yearly, sometimes for a term of years, were entered into with the zaminddrs to pay a lump sum for the area over which they exercised control. If the offer of the zaminddr was not deemed satisfactory, another contractor was substituted in his place. But no steps were taken, and perhaps no steps were possible, to ascertain in detail the amount which the country could afford to pay. For more than twenty years these temporary engagements continued, and received the sanction of Warren Hastings, the first titular governor-general of India. Hastings s great rival, Francis, was among those who urged the superior advantages of a permanent assessment. At last, in 1789, a more accurate investigation into the agricultural resources of Bengal was commenced, and the settlement based upon this investigation was declared perpetual by Lord Cornwallis in 1793. The zaminddrs of that time were raised to the status of landlords, with rights of transfer and inheritance, subject always to the payment in perpetuity of a rent-charge. In default of due payment, their lands were liable to be sold to the highest bidder. The aggre gate assessment was fixed at sikkd Us. 26,800,989, equi valent to Co. s Rs. 28,587,722, or say 2-f millions sterling. By the year 1871-72 the total land revenue realized from the same area had increased to Us. 35,208,866, chiefly owing to the inclusion of estates which had escaped the original assessment for various reasons. While the claim of Government against the zaminddrs was thus fixed for ever, it was intended that the rights of the zaminddrs over their own tenants should be equally restricted. But no detailed record of tenant-right was inserted in the settle ment papers, and, as a matter of fact, the cultivators lost rather than gained in security of tenure. The same English prejudice which made a landlord of the zaminddr could recognize nothing but a tenant-at-will in the rdyat. By two stringent regulations of 1799 and 1812 the tenant was practically put at the mercy of a rack-renting landlord. If he failed to pay his rent, however excessive, his property was rendered liable to distraint and his person to im prisonment. At the same time the operation of the revenue sale law had introduced a new race of zaminddrs, who were bound to their tenants by no traditions of hereditary sympathy, but whose sole object was to make a profit out of their newly purchased property. The rack- La rented peasantry found no protection in the law courts until lf &quot; 1859, when an Act was passed which restricted the land- lord s powers of enhancement in certain specified cases. The zaminddr is the only person recognized by the revenue law ; but in a large number of cases the zaminddr has in effect parted with all his interest in the land by means of the creation of perpetual leases or patnis. These leases are usually granted in consideration of a premium or lump sum paid down, and there is nothing to prevent the patmddr from creating an indefinite series of sub-tenures beneath his own. The permanent settlement was not preceded by any systematic survey. But in the course of the past thirty years the whole of Bengal has been subject to a professional survey, which determined the boundaries of every village, and issued maps on the scale of 4 inches to the mile.