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 CHAPTER II

The Revenue Survey and Political Training

Revenue Survey.

In entering the Revenue Survey department, Henry Lawrence began a career which was almost entirely spent in direct touch with the natives of India, either the civil or the military community; losing meanwhile that intimate contact with British troops and their families in which he had been placed during the first ten years of his service. What use he had made of that experience will presently be seen, from the advantage and benefit to which he turned it in founding the Lawrence Asylum twelve years afterwards.

This Revenue Survey, in which he worked for five years, was comparatively in its infancy. It had been devised by one of the ablest of the Civil administrators of those days, with the object of obtaining sound data for the assessment of the land revenue; the groundwork of which had hitherto been in so chaotic a state as to give great scope for fraud and trickery, and also to inflict dire injustice and hardship on some large bodies of the people, while at the same time it let