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312 call him a zamindar, the peasants of his raj would still regard him as the Raja.

We shall now be able to follow without pause Sir James Lyall's description of a Rajput principality in the Punjab hills, which I shall give presently almost in his own words. I have, however, first to say something of the part of the country to which it applies. Roughly, it is the Himalayan ranges between Simla and Kashmir. Much of it consists of forests and grazing-grounds, or impracticable precipices or crags. But in valleys or on hillsides at the lower elevations there is a good deal of cultivated land; and terraced fields surrounding picturesque and scattered homesteads are often the foreground of vast woods of pine and cedar, crowned in the distance by perpetual snows. This land of mountains has immemorially been divided into petty states. In one part of it the tradition is that there used to be twenty-two principalities, eleven owning the headship of the Katoch Rajas of Kangra, and eleven known as the Dogra Circle, of which the headship was vested in the chief of Jammu, a territory which is now incorporated with Kashmir. The Delhi emperors subjugated the Rajas of these hills and recognised them as zamindars of these states, but did not interfere materially with the old state of society. Nor in remote outlying regions was the grip of the Gurkbas, or after them of the Sikhs, strong enough to twist into new shapes the old traditional institutions. Under these Rajas the theory of property in land (I am now reproducing almost verbally Sir James Lyall's report) was that each Raja was the landlord of the whole of his principality. He was not the lord paramount of inferior lords of manors, though, as I have shown, he might have a sort of suzerain above him. He was, as it were, manorial lord of his whole country, which was divided not into townships cultivated by village communities, or into estates, but into circuits—mere groupings of separate holdings under one collector of rents. The rent due from each field was payable direct to the Raja, and represented his share of the produce. He might remit or assign it; but if he assigned it as a jagir he gave the jagir in scattered pieces, so as to prevent the growth of any intermediate lordship. Every sort of right connected with land might be held direct of the Raja as a separate tenancy : the right, for instance, of cultivation, of pasture, of netting game and