in the revenue administration, lest (as was generally the case in India) further additions should be made to their almost intolerable burdens. Let the reader, I say, consider these things, and then ask himself, whether a government assessor, with every soul in the country thus opposed to his research, is likely to attain the requisite information for justly valuing every acre of cultivated land, including every variety of soil, and of product; or, if it could be justly valued, whether the collectors of such a government were likely to be guided by any better rule than to extract, from the contributors, all that could with safety be drawn into their own, and the public, purse.

This, however, is but a sketch of that state society in Hindostan; of which demoralization was the inevitable result. Where laws, regulations, and even official instructions, are but a name; where power is really uncontrouled, and usage affords abundant openings for its arbitrary exercise, the holders of power, with their numerous hangers-on, will be arrayed on one side as instruments of oppression, to which the Ryots, or the mass of the people, have nought to oppose but evasion, falsehood, artifice, and cunning. Some of the worst passions of the human mind, thus called into constant action, become settled habits; and

every rising generation being of necessity, and from infancy, driven to the practice of these habits, a character of slavish submission, and moral degradation, is generated, which it is most illiberal, and unjust, to impute to this oppressed people, as inherent and incorrigible depravity.

At the bottom of all this evil is the revenue or financial system of India, either introduced by the Mussulmans, or continued from an earlier age, and handed down without variation in all its main features and principles to the present hour. It is this system which, to my mind at least, affords a clue to the mazes of Asiatic despotisms; to the chief distinctions of character observable between the inhabitants of the eastern, and western, world; and a full answer to the fallacious reasoning founded on the supposed immutability and castes of native Indians.

Writers on India, and even the local official servants of the Company, have always been too much given to cling to native records, and the institutions of older times, having a plausible appearance of method and order, as if they were systems which had been in regular and established operation, enforced or controuled by fixed laws or regulations, not to be evaded with impunity; and apparently for

repre

getting altogether that the executive government, like all Asiatic monarchies, was one of pure arbitrary will, and discretion, from the highest to the lowest holders of power. Existing authorities consequently concur in senting the financial deparment of these administrations as one uniform scene of indiscriminate rapine; whilst the pretended registers of the assessment, cultivation, and produce of land, were mere speculations, in point of accuracy or utility not worth one straw, from the famed Tumar Jumma of Tudor Mull, down, I verily believe, to the celebrated Ryotwary assessment of Sir Thomas Munro.*

The Ayeen Akbery itself affords

The reader should always keep in mind in respect to these highly lauded registers, that the Tumar Jumma is expressly termed by the learned Abul Fazel, "an estimate of the produce of lands," taken from such accounts as the provincial Canongoes thought proper to produce; that in another place it is said to have been settled "on the representations of men of integrity," and at a time when the "harvests were uncommonly plentiful;" and in another, that he describes the mode of assessing lands which he terms "Kunkoot" literally meaning a conjectural estimate of grain. In Vol. I. page 465, we have Sir Thomas Monro's own acknowledgment, that after much labour and expence, and sending forth one assessor after another to correct errors and detect frauds, he was at length reduced to the necessity of trusting, like Tudor Mull, to the estimates. of "men of integrity," and fixing a sum of revenue in the gross on each village for which the whole community were made responsible.

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decisive evidence of the little regard shewn to what were called, or considered, fixed legal rates of land-taxation. It says, "In former "times the monarchs of Hindostan exacted “the sixth of the produce of the lands; in the "Turkish empire the husbandman paid the fifth; in Turan the sixth; in Iran the "tenth; but at the same time there was levied a general poll tax, which was called Kheraj. Of the aggregate amount of this exaction we may form a tolerable conjecture, by its being explained to us, in the following page, that, in Iran and Turan, government has "taken one tenth of the produce of the soil, but at the same time the husbandman "is loaded with a number of other taxes, which 'altogether exceed half the produce."†

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In

page 310, Abul Fazel gives an account of various vexatious taxes, equal, he says, in aggregate amount to what his translator calls the quit rent (by which I presume he means

* In Turkey the capitation tax, according to Volney, is also called Karadj. In Indian writers generally the term Kheraj is used to express the Mussulman land-tax imposed on vanquished Pagans-Vide Vol. I. p. 319; or in other words, the ransom which Mussulman conquerors exacted from unbelievers for the great mercy of not slaughtering them, and enslaving their wives and children.

the Jumma) of Hindostan; for after Akbar's reign, we know, that in Bengal, the Abwabs alone nearly doubled, and in Cossim Ali's time more than doubled, the original Jumma. But, it will be said, these vexatious taxes were all remitted by the "boundless bounty" of the emperor Akbar. Akbar. I have I have already expressed my doubt of the actual remission. The Firmans of the Moghul emperors abound with excellent instructions, sound advice, the best moral precepts, and expressions of anxiious solicitude for the happiness and prosperity of the Ryots. These Firmins have excited not only the admiration, but the belief of many writers, that they were the practical principles of a Mogul administration. In practice, however, what were they but a dead letter?* At all events, to whatever extent the "boundless bounty" of Akbar may, for a time, have been exercised, we know, from

It is curious to compare the "Instructions for the Sepahsillar or Viceroy" in the Ayeen Akbery, with the actual conduct of these officers in their respective governments. The one is a grave exhortation to all that is good and righteous, whilst the other, as far at least as it can be traced in history, is conspicuous for the utter disregard of every thing but the gratification of his own will. We may hence learn to estimate the value of imperial rescripts, in governments like those of Asia, when such rescripts are at variance with the objects or interests of the persons to whose execution they are entrusted.

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