fessional education and whose daily practice have been engaged upon the traditional forms and technical framework of a system which comes to their hands sanctioned by the usages and stamped by the learning of centuries,— from them to expect the initiative of that emancipation of land which the necessities of modern life, agricultural and commercial, demand, from restrictions imposed during historical periods, when those interests had no representative in the State. The land has parted with protection in the disposal of its produce, and confronts the rivalry of the world. In that rivalry it encounters the laws which govern the productive powers of other States, laws resting upon the diffusion, not the concentration of land, or the contraction of its resources. The testimony of a host of witnesses who have communicated their views personally or by writing, to the Royal Commissions that have sat from time to time during the last forty years, and of writers, professional and otherwise, whose very pamphlets, if collected, would form an encyclopædia of real-property-law reform, might be cited to show that the rendering effectual the Registry of title, based upon an authorised map on the cadastral (6 inch) scale, and free of stamp-duty for the first five years-restriction of Entail to lives in being at the date of the Settlement, or death of the Testator, -- the assimilation of the law of landed Intestacy to that in the case of personalty, the fusion of Legal and Equitable estates, and the assimilation of the law of agricultural to that of trade Fixtures, would do more to advance the interests of those concerned in the land, and those dependent on them, than all the cumbrous mechanism which the law now lavishes upon forms that operate by withdrawing from each ownership in turn that fertilising power and action in the present, which experience has shown to be the best protection of the Future. III. THE TENURE OF LAND IN INDIA. BY GEORGE CAMPBELL. CONTENTS. TENURES PREVIOUS TO BRITISH RULE. Property in land-Feudalism-Revenue-free holdings-The land THE BENGAL SYSTEM Early management The settlement of 1793-Subsequent history THE SYSTEM OF THE NORTH-WEST PROVINCES Acquisition and management-Regulation VII. of 1822-The thirty Tenures-Peculiarities of management-The result. THE RYOTWAR SYSTEMS OF MADRAS AND BOMBAY The Madras system-The Bombay system-Recent measures in RECENT LEGISLATION AND SETTLEMENTS Difficulties to be adjusted-Act X. of 1859-The landlord and THE LAND QUESTION IN OUDE THE CENTRAL PROVINCES SUMMARY OF TENURES GRANTS OF WASTE LAND TENURES PREVIOUS TO BRITISH RULE. 149 184 195 198 206 217 225 229 229 It is sometimes said that India is composed of so many different countries that we can never speak of it as a whole. I do not think that is the case in the full sense in which the statement is made. Probably, six or eight hundred years ago, in the European countries which had been conquered and ruled first by the Romans and then by the Germanic peoples, there was a greater similarity of institutions and manners than in modern days. Similarly it has happened that, however different may have been the aborigines of different provinces of India, they have been covered by successive waves, first of Hindoo populations, and then of Mahommedan conquerors, and so have been assimilated in perhaps a greater degree than ever were European countries. We have no historical record of the advances of the Hindoo peoples, but much still remains, in the ethnography and institutions of the country, to show that they may be divided into at least two classes, the earlier Brahminical Hindoos, and the later tribes of more democratic character and more nearly allied to the Germans, who preceded the Mahommedans in the rule of the country. After all that has passed, the institutions of these Hindoo races still survive in almost every Indian village. The Mahommedan conquest and dominion was more complete and more centralized than that of any power which has ruled in Europe since the Romans. Twice have Mahommedan empires ruled over the whole of India, with little exception. In the interval between these two universal empires the country was not lost to the Mahommedans, but was for the most part divided among several Mahommedan dynasties, very similar to one another in character. The last great Mahommedan empire, which welded all India into one country, was in its zenith no longer ago than the beginning of the last century. Its rule was highly centralised, and from Peshawur to Cape Comorin on the one side, and to Chittagong on the other, much of its official system, and almost all its official language, survive to the present day. My view then is that, although the present circumstances of the various provinces of India infinitely vary, their institutions may be traced to very similar sources. We may say that very varied forms have been built up on various plans, but that the materials are in the main the same. I would first try to explain the conditions of landed tenures which we found in existence, and then would exhibit the different phases which they have assumed in different provinces under British administration. The long-disputed question, whether private property in land existed in India before the British rule, is one which can never be satisfactorily settled, because it is, like many disputed matters, principally a question of the meaning to be applied to words. Those who deny the existence of this property mean property in one sense; those who affirm its existence mean property in another sense. We are too apt to forget that property in land, as a transferable mercantile commodity absolutely owned and passing from hand to hand like any chattel, is not an ancient institution but a modern development, reached only in a few very advanced countries. In the greater part of the world the right of cultivating particular portions of the earth is rather a privilege than a property; a privilege first of a whole people, then of a particular tribe or a particular village community, and finally, of particular individuals of the community. In this last stage the land is partitioned off to these individuals as a matter of mutual convenience, but not in unconditional property; it long remains subject to certain conditions and to reversionary interests of the community, which prevent its uncontrolled alienation, and attach to it certain common rights and common burdens. A still more important distinction is this, that in countries which have been conquered by immigrant races from predecessors who had already cultivated the soil (that is, in almost all the countries of the old world), the dominant arms-bearers generally cannot cultivate the whole of the land themselves, and do not attempt to cultivate through others on the modern capitalist farmer and labourer system; they willingly leave in actual possession of the greater part of the soil the people who cultivated it and who are attached to it by many bonds. Hence we have a very widely-prevailing distinction between the privilege of levying the customary rent and the privilege of occupying the soil. In India the rent was generally levied by the State or the immediate |