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 CONDITION IN 1870 159

fish near the rivers could be bought for almost nothing. Crime of all kinds was rare, chiefly because of the remembrance of the terrible punish- ments of Gulab Singh’s time, and because of the system of fixing responsibility for undetected crime upon local officials. Drunkenness, too, was almost unknown. About half a lakh of rupees was spent upon education, and another half-lakh on repairing the “paths.” <A slight attempt was also made to assess the amount of land revenue at a fixed amount. This much was to the good, but yet the country was still very far indeed from what it ought to have been. The means of communication were rough and rude in the extreme, so that men instead of animals had to be -used as beasts of burden. Even the new assess- ment of the Jand revenue was three times as heavy as that of the amount demanded in British districts in the Punjab. And there was still much waste land which the people were unwilling to put under cultivation, because under the existing system of land revenue administration they could not be sure that they would ever receive the results of their labour. <A cultivator would only produce as much as would, after payment of his revenue, provide for the actual wants of himself