Page:Lord Amherst and the British Advance Eastwards to Burma.djvu/44

 brilliant operations of military police carried out by Lord Hastings, had delivered the toiling masses. But in the attempt to grapple with the emergencies of the situation, which the first generation of British officers had to face in the perturbed and harried provinces along the Jumna and the upper course of the Ganges, some of the most tragic blunders of Lower Bengal were repeated. Settlement operations, which are now as familiar to the people as festivals or pilgrimages, were then a bewildering novelty. The initial impulse of the district officer was to frame a register, and unluckily in those prepared in some of the freshly acquired tracts separate columns were allotted to Farmer (in the sense of 'contractor-for-the-payment of Government revenue') and Owner. Our methods of administration had from the first beginnings of the Company's rule been carried out to a great extent through members of the Writer class—a caste of small consideration in native eyes, but indispensable to the working of the exotic method. They have their virtues—industry, pliability, and unquestioning subservience to the express orders and even desires of their superior. But they have their failings also—failings by no means peculiar to the Writer caste,—selfish cunning and rapacity. It was a very simple thing for one of these functionaries, when charged with the preliminary duty of making out the register, to record the owner not as owner but as 'Farmer,' and to avail himself at the earliest opportunity of any technical lapse in