Page:The Marquess Cornwallis and the Consolidation of British Rule.djvu/53

Rh hend the custom of the country in regard to the spread of cultivation. In the first and most important of his Regulations he expresses a hope that the Zamíndárs would exert themselves to cultivate their lands, and would improve their respective estates, and he assures them that they would enjoy exclusively the fruits of their own industry without any fear that the demands of Government would be augmented in consequence of any such increase of cultivation and enhanced value of landed property. From the use of the above phrases we can only conceive the ideal or typical Zamíndár whom Cornwallis had in his mind, to be identical with what in England we should call an improving landlord: one who expends capital in planting trees where corn will not grow with profit, in making hedges, clearing out ditches, draining wet lands, and erecting model cottages of the most approved type. Now it has been already shown that the Zamíndár in almost every district did spend considerable sums in digging tanks, building temples and gháts, and cutting canals. But he never spent a farthing on drains, cottages, breaking up jungle and waste land, or in introducing the higher and more lucrative kinds of cultivation on any holding within his estate. The whole of this burden fell on the Ryot.

It is true that a Zamíndár gave to the Ryot whom he inducted into a plot of ground, the countenance which was at all times indispensable in such a country as India. He was occasionally, to such