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 CHAPTER

IV.

If the promise of events is to bear fruit in fulfilment, February 13th, 1856, is the most important day in the whole annals of Oudh, for it was then for the first time that its society was

brought under the influence of a power with solvents strong enough to disintegrate eventually its compact organization. Our first essay on administration was based on ignorance and ended in disaster. The ofiicers who were entrusted with the all-important work of settling the land revenue had been imbued with the principles of the so-called Thomasonian school, and shared the prejudices of the only native society with which they had been personally acquainted, that of the court. The first told them that the village communities were the only element in the country which deserved to be maintained the second that the taluqdars were a set of grasping interlopers, in arms against the officials and tyrants to the people, whose sole object was to defraud Government of its revenue. The result was that orders were issued to disregard them wherever it was possible, and to take the engagements everywhere from the yeoman classes. In fact, the policy which Lucknow had for so many years been endeavouring to put in practice was to be carried out at once by main force. The instructions were well acted up to. The chieftains were stripped of nearly all their villages and a settlement made What the in which they were entirely left out of consideration. result would have been it is difficult to conjecture. But little more than a year had elapsed when the great sepoy nmtiny broke out, and allowed them to show that it was easier to deprive them of The English power had their property than of their influence. hardly fallen when they at once resumed more than their former position. Again they collected the revenue without question throughout their territories again the armed levies rallied around them against the stranger and long after the defeat of the mutineers, they had to be subdued one by one and their forts razed to the ground before the authority of Government could be re-estab;





lished.

thing at least had been made evident, that policy and ju&tice alike forbade their being overlooked in the new settlement which the pacification of the province necessitated. The leading principle of the second revenue settlement, whose main lines re-

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