Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/472

 450 THE ECONOMIC JOURNA?- cultivator, reputed to be a fair arrangement. Mahomedan gov- ernments were influenced in the direction of severity in assessing their Hindoo subjects' farms.by the distinction made between infidels and believersthe imposts on the former class might lawfully much exceed those upon the latter. The needs of continual warfare precluded Mahomedan and Mahratta alike fro.to. mitigating demands, and the period of confusion to which British rule succeeded had witnessed the destruction of agricul- tural capital. Land hardly possessed a selling value at the end of the Mysore wars. Read, Munro, and their pupils were the Griftiths of Southern India, roughly basing their earlier assessments on the right of the State to one-third of the gross crop of ordinary--or two- fifths of the gross crop of irrigated land. Early in the present century Madras was drawn into a policy of Permanent Settlement, justifiable in Bengal by many arguments, not equally applicable to the case of Madras. The newly created barons were to guarantee, on the baronies carved out for them, a land revenue approximate to that which Mahomedan or Mahratta reivers had demanded. Where such spoilers had failed to gain a firm hold, old Hindu families had usurped or retained power: with these more generous terms were made, and the expense of certain public chages were left to be borne by them. These nobles as a class have kept their estates and their engagements with a government which has not called on them to pay the cost of moderaised administration. It fared ill with the farmers of Revenue at a rack-rent: the country had been scourged by war; internal trade, in the absence of means of communication, de- veloped but slowly; ancient irrigation works were in disrepair; and British engineers and their triumphs in this field came not yet. The settlement with the new men broke down, and was gradually replaced by arrangements made' direct with the culti- vators at varying rates, some thirty per cent. below those which Read, Munro, and their pupils had deduced, partly from their estimates of produce, partly from the rates in vogue before our coming. Munro himself was the principal adviser of the return to the Ryotwari system of settlement with individual cultivators, which he re-introduced as Governor of the presidency about 1820. Thereafter, the land had rest for forty years under John Company; but the stationary condition of Land Revenue and cultivation and the need of a Scientific Survey, as a part of the machinery needful in the management of the immense estate of