provincial Agricultural department, can hardly be overstated. They have brought about a complete revolution in the system under which settlements were formerly made. The administration will be strengthened; the interests of the agricultural population will be better protected; the efficiency of the courts will be increased, because they will have access to trustworthy records of the rights of all persons interested in the land; the expenses of litigation will be reduced; and the saving of money to the Government will be very large.1

The Reports of the settlement officers constitute, in the words of Sir Henry Maine, a whole literature of very great extent and variety, and of the utmost value and instructiveness.' I have now before me one of these Settlement Reports, a folio volume of more than four hundred I doubt whether there is any English pages. county of which you could find so minute a description. Physical geography, climate, history, castes, religions, communications, population, commerce, condition of the people, education, agricultural statistics, systems of cultivation, tenures of land, history of past and present settlements, rates of rent and revenue-there is hardly a subject of interest in regard to which the results of long and patient investigation have not been recorded. This is the class of authorities to which we must go if we desire to learn the truth about the condition of the people.

Excepting in Bengal, where nearly a century ago a permanent settlement of the land revenue was made without surveys, and on data to which at the present time we should attach no value, systems of settlement It has been estimated that the saving in the cost of settlement operations which these reforms have made possible in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh will amount, in the period of thirty years for which the settlements are made, to 1,187,0001.

as careful and elaborate as that which I have been describing exist in all the chief provinces of British India. The plans followed in the Punjab and in the Central Provinces are based, for the most part, on those of the North-Western Provinces. In Southern India, where the prevailing tenures of land are different, the systems of assessment are, as I have already said, different also. Under one system or another, cadastral surveys have been made and registers of rights and possession have been prepared, which, notwithstanding inevitable imperfections, are probably more complete than any that exist in any other country. Much in the existing land revenue system of Northern India is due to the great Akbar; it assumed almost its present form under the East India Company; it owes much of its perfection to James Thomason,1 one of the most enlightened men that have administered an Indian province; and its efficiency has gone on increasing since the transfer of the government to the Crown. No greater and more beneficent work has ever been undertaken than these vast operations, extending over several hundred thousands of square miles, designed to protect the interests of more than 100,000,000 of people.

The system adopted in the North-Western Provinces has formed the basis of the settlements in Oudh; but in the latter province there are some exceptional facts which I must notice.

In speaking of Bengal I shall have to refer to the unfortunate mistakes which led to the confiscation of the rights of a large proportion of the peasantry. The story of the settlement in Oudh is in some respects hardly less lamentable.

1 Mr. Thomason was Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces from 1843 to 1853.

I shall have occasion, in another lecture, to refer to the condition of Oudh in 1856, when it became British territory. The Tálukdárs were the great landlords, and about two-thirds of the province were included in their estates. Some of them belonged to families which had been in possession for centuries, and their claims to be recognised as proprietors could not rightly be denied. Some had been officials or revenue contractors, intermediate between the Native Government and the village proprietors; by their ability or rapacity they had often become holders of large estates, and had managed to appropriate to themselves more or less completely the rights of the old occupants.

On the annexation of Oudh in 1856, the Tálukdárs were treated neither with discrimination nor justice. In the first settlement of the land revenue, claims were often ignored which ought to have been admitted, and when the mutinies of 1857 occurred the majority of the Tálukdárs went into open rebellion. I will not give in any detail the history of what followed. A proclamation was issued by Lord Canning, confiscating to the British Government, with a few exceptions, all landed property in Oudh. His object, regarding which there was at first much misunderstanding, was to get rid of all the obligations involved by the settlement of 1856, to obtain a tabula rasa which would give the opportunity of repairing the injustice with which many of the Talukdárs had been treated, and of restoring their estates on condition of loyal submission. This purpose was effectually carried out, but unfortunate consequences followed. After the mutinies there came over the British Government and its officers, almost throughout India-happily, for a short time only, but long enough to do much injury—a flood of reactionary opinions, and

all the experience of the past seemed forgotten. Permanent settlements of the land revenue were to be introduced; great landlords were to be created or their growth encouraged, in the belief that they would become devoted supporters of our Government; the system of dealing with small village proprietors and communities was pronounced politically unwise; the rights of tenants were declared to have no existence, or at any rate must not be strengthened to the detriment of the landlord.

When Oudh was reoccupied after the mutinies, in 1858, it offered a fine field for the application of such opinions. The maintenance,' the Government of India wrote to the Secretary of State in November 1859, of a landed aristocracy in India, where it exists, is an object of such importance that we may well afford to sacrifice to it something of a system which, while it has increased the independence and protected the rights of the cultivators of the soil, has led to the exhaustion or decay of the old nobility.' India is doubtless not a country in which it would be wise to ignore the consideration due to families whose position and claims may have been recognised for centuries, and which in the eyes of the people still retain their titles to honour, and in the settlement of 1856 many of the Tálukdárs received scant justice. But the injustice that followed the new arrangements was worse. The ancient rights of multitudes of small proprietors and cultivators, rights often older and more undoubted than those of the Tálukdárs, were swept away or ignored; the Tálukdárs not only recovered their estates, but they received, in many cases, extravagant privileges to which they themselves made no pretensions, and solemn promises that those privileges should be maintained were given by the Government. It is true that, under the orders of

Lord Canning, all subordinate rights in the land which had been actually enjoyed before the annexation of the province were to be preserved; but the onus of proof lay upon those who claimed them. In consequence of the orders of confiscation, followed by the grant of full rights of property to the Tálukdárs, the legal presumption was prima facie that the right of the Tálukdár was complete and that other rights in the land had been extinguished. Anarchy prevailed in Oudh before annexation, and it was difficult for an ignorant peasant to prove that he had enjoyed at that time rights independent of those of the Tálukdár. The fate of the tenants was as bad as that of the small proprietors. With rare exceptions, rights of occupancy in the land were declared to have no existence in Oudh. Lord Lawrence, when he became Viceroy, was anxious that remedies should, so far as was possible, be applied, to diminish the injustice which had been done. I was myself, as Chief Commissioner of Oudh, one of the agents through whom he acted, but I look back with no satisfaction on such amount of success as was gained. Public opinion in India was still going through the phase of admiration for artificially created aristocratic institutions; and, both in his own Council and in England, Lord Lawrence met with such strong opposition that it was impossible to do much. He did all that seemed at the time practicable, but it may be a question whether it would not have been better to have done nothing; for although protection was given to an important class of small proprietors, and to a small class of tenants, it may be feared that the measures that were taken tended to give greater strength to a vicious system.

About two-thirds of the land in Oudh are owned by 272 great landlords, the Tálukdárs, and one-third by