Page:Lord Amherst and the British Advance Eastwards to Burma.djvu/45

 satisfying the dues of the State to secure the property for some nominee of his own. A favourite device was to leave the Owner column a blank in the first periodical register (for the settlements were for short terms); in the next to insert a fictitious owner, and in a third to note that it had been transferred by this imaginary person to the clever clerk or his umbra. Thus many a family which even in our own day the people regard as the rightful owners of broad lands were transformed into petty tenants, while in a still sadder and larger number of instances the rights dating from the most remote times of village communities were not so much confiscated as ignored. In Lower Bengal, before we had any concern with its government, these ancient Aryan institutions had fallen into decay and had for practical purposes ceased to be. When Lord Wellesley's conquests made the Company lord of new territories on the North-West, the civilians who were despatched to make the first settlements brought with them unfortunately the impressions they had derived from experience in the Lower Provinces. Every schoolboy now knows something about village communities; but it was only slowly that their existence — though they had survived the shock of centuries of change in supreme rule—became apparent to Anglo-Indian officials. It is essential to the due understanding of these initial blunders to remember that after our countrymen had discovered towards the end of the last century the corruption and the incapacity of the native func-