Page:Lord Amherst and the British Advance Eastwards to Burma.djvu/42

 of the rival system of Madras. This is not the place to attempt a solution of the insoluble. There is reason in the contention that Lord Cornwallis, by fixing once for all the payments to be made by those who were recognized by him as the landed class, laid a firm basis of loyalty in self-interest. British rule was obviously acceptable to men to whom it assured the easy enjoyment of influence and property. But these eulogists of the Permanent Settlement will not hesitate to admit that, in carrying out the principle, grievous errors were made. The rights of the hereditary cultivators—the true owners of the soil as far as ownership can be said to exist in India—were, if not overlooked, at least left unprovided for, and the right of paying the government revenue, with all the power and privileges that this right implied, was conferred in a great number of instances on men who had hardly any title by long possession and none by prescriptive usage. Even to many of these the headlong gift proved ruinous. The habits of their class had made it morally impossible that they could comply with the stringent conditions imposed as to the payment of the fixed state rent. The result was the wholesale transfer of estates which might well be described as territories to the clever underlings of the English officials. It is a melancholy truth that the first result of our Western administration in the East is to create these opportunities for astute clerks, who have a sufficiently keen intelligence to avail themselves of all the