paying the land tax direct to the Government, often in minute sums; and yet in which the revenue is collected with ease, as it always will be where the land has saleable value. There are, at present, in Canara, fifty-five thousand holdings, of which nineteen thousand pay less than ten rupees a year, and yet sales for arrears of revenue are almost unknown, and the reference to the European officer is as frequently on the question, who shall be allowed to pay, as who shall be made to pay, the dues of Government. The rent-roll of the whole district we append in a note.*

The tenure then is certainly essentially Ryotwari; but with those measures which have reduced taxation, and raised the value of land till it is saleable throughout the district, except in the jungly and unhealthy, or thinly peopled portions, have disappeared those evils which have been represented as inherent in the system. In the coast talooks, annual scrutiny is unknown, and the landholder, thoroughly aware of the amount of his assessment, may pay it and stand independent of the Revenue officer. The yearly settlement of the Cusbah talook, paying a revenue of more than two lakhs of rupees, occupies two afternoons; because the cultivable land is all appropriated

* Abstract of the Rent-roll of the Canara district.

The collections of the Land Revenue are made with striking punctuality, and the balances irrecoverable are of the most trifling amount. Those struck off in the last five years on account of losses by floods, or fire, or other causes, contrasted with the settlement of the year, afford convincing proof of this.

and all saleable: and the time occupied in the settlement of other talooks is exactly in an inverse ratio to the saleable value of the land, increasing inwards from the coast to those tracts where cultivation is still struggling with the jungle.

The landed property of the district is grouping itself into holdings of every size, and while on the one hand the commercial, and what may be called the intellectual, classes, the servants of Government, the court pleaders, &c., invest their property in land whenever they are able to obtain it, and thus a new landlord class intermediate between the actual cultivators and the Government is spontaneously growing up,-on the other a numerous class of able-bodied men are ready to give their labour for daily hire, and, when the harvest of the coast is completed, proceed above the Ghâts to gather in the later crops of that elevation, or to labour in the Betel or pepper gardens. For the public works there is never any difficulty in collecting two or three hundred efficient workmen. Here, therefore, the supposed equalizing and impoverishing effects of Ryotwari tenure do not appear; but, with a growth proportioned to the net profit left to the owner, a new proprietory body is extending, and the complaint in the province is, that such is the case, that estates split to pieces by the Hindu law of inheritance, and the family divisions which it entails, are passing from the hereditary_resident proprietors to the moneyed classes of the towns. This transfer from one class to another* is not due to any effect of Ryotwari tenure, but arises from the same process of "morcellement" as is in progress in France, and in other parts of Europe, under the law which compels the division of inherited property among all the children; and it is aided in Canara by that most pernicious law by which property descends to the sister's children, an endless source of family disunion, fraud, and waste.†

*Of the native servants now in the employment of Government (exclusive of the heads of villages and other village officers) 386 are the owners of 2,082 estates of various sizes, the aggregate assessment on which is Rs. 48,598-12-3.

Since the above was written, we have met with the following passage in The life and Letters of Niebuhr, which strikingly illustrates what we have here stated. "In Westphalia, and other parts, we have in the entailed free-holds an hereditary yeomanry, in whom, wherever they exist, we possess a highly respectable peasant aristocracy, wealthy enough to give their sons a good education, with the consciousness of an honorable descent, and a youth not depressed by poverty; and thus to add respectable members to the middle class, especially to the clergy of both confessions. But, wherever the Code Napoleon has been introduced, its adherents, who have gained the public ear by assuming to be the representatives of public opinion, insist upon the divisibility of landed property. They had already surreptitiously obtained a confirmation of the French and Westphalian ordinances; and though this is suspended, heaven knows how the matter will be decided at last! Yet, people have before their eyes, the example of other German countries, where

We are not arguing that where village communities exist in their integrity, and are in accordance with the feelings of the people, it would be advisable or just to break them down; or that any one system would be applicable to the whole of India ; but we do argue that any endeavour artificially to create an intermediate proprietory body between the cultivators of the soil and the Government, be it composed of village corporations, of Zemindars, or of farmers of the revenue, is unjust towards the present owners of the soil, and that such institutions must be injurious where they are not the spontaneous growth of the country, and supported by the affections of the people. Where none such are found, a Ryotwari settlement is, we believe, the only just and wise measure that can be adopted, and, when a Ryotwari settlement has once been made, to attempt any other would, we are persuaded, be a step backwards.

We cannot for a moment believe that any change will ever be made in Sir Thomas Munro's settlements, further than by developing them, by measures such as those which have been traced in the history of this province; but at the present moment, when those who profess to speak the sentiments of the people of India, have been led to record, in a deliberate petition to. Parliament, sentiments adverse to the opinion of the greatest and wisest man that ever ruled over them, and to suggest measures destructive of that individual property which can best draw forth the industry of a nation and save the humble from oppression, we have thought that it might not be useless to offer other views as fair matter for candid discussion; and we are satisfied that those who have represented the people of the Madras Presidency as adverse to the system of Munro, may have uttered the sentiments of a few persons at the capital, but have not expressed the feelings of the body of the people.

this cursed divisibility has existed for ages, and the whole agricultural population are beggars. In the district of Montauban, now belonging to Nassau, no deputy can be chosen for the Diet, because it does not contain a single elector. The qualification for an elector consists in paying one florin (1s. 8d.) land-tax. This sounds incredible, but my informant lives close to the district, and has known that part of the country from his infancy. There, on the Rhine, the larger estates are entirely disappearing, and the smaller ones are constantly divided, and sub-divided; and what a class are the peasantry! An estate which is considered one of the largest, was lately sold for 85,000 francs. (£3,400) Manufacturers, advocates, &c., &c., buy plots of land, and farm them out, so that in the neighborhood of the towns the peasant proprietors are vanishing, as in Italy.-Niebuhr's Life, Vol. II, p. 304. Here then we see evils precisely similar to those which have been attributed to the Ryotwari system-but they are not there ascribed to the machinery by which the land tax is collected, but to the law which is breaking every landed property into pieces-and is destroying equally the larger landlords, and the peasant proprietors of Europe, and the Zemindari estates and the Ryotwari holdings of India.

We are sure that, if the real desires of the great body of the landholders of Madras, small and great, had been truly represented, it would have been comprised in these few words, "a light assessment, and tenure direct from the Government.

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In the late discussions much has been written on the relative merits of the revenue systems of the several Presidencies, but we cannot but think that far too much stress has been laid on the system of collection, while a far more important question has been left in the back ground. That important question is, not what system of collection is best, but what amount of taxation can a country bear; and it is idle to compare two systems, if one is applied to an oppressive, the other to an easy taxation. It was with the object of bringing this view of the question prominently forward, that we endeavoured, in a former article, to institute a comparison between a Ryotwari district of Madras and one of the districts of the N. W. Provinces, and to show how much heavier is the pressure of taxation generally in Madras; and it is with the same view that we have endeavoured to follow the results of the gradual alleviation of the burdens on the land, the Ryotwari system being maintained in its integrity, in the province we have now described.

If, in one part of India we are expending millions to construct magnificent canals, and dispense the water at one or two Rupees per acre, and in another part we continue to demand 75 per cent of the produce, amounting to thirty rupees an acre and upwards, what fair comparison can be made between the village tenures of the one and the Ryotwari tenures of the other. It matters little what may be the course pursued for reducing the taxation of the Madras districts; whether it be done by a direct sacrifice of revenue (as in Cawnpore) or by taking an average of previous collections, and making this a maximum of demand, or by adding so much waste land to present holdings as shall reduce the assessment to a moderate demand on the whole (as has virtually been done in Canara,) or whether all these be combined; whatever may be the course pursued, the reductions which Sir T. Munro showed to be indispensable, must be carried out before his system can be condemned. But if, when Ryotwari assessment has been made as light as that of the N. W., or as that of the Zemindari estates of Bengal, it fails to produce results as beneficial, then, and then only, will it have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

ART. III.—1. Political Incidents of the First Burmese War. By Thos. Campbell Robertson.

2. Commons' Committee: Minutes of Evidence.

3. The Six Travels of John Baptista Tavernier. (Translation.)

BEFORE Assam fell under the rule of the British Government, the country had, for a long period, been harassed by the repeated invasions of savage tribes. The people, scattered abroad, and driven from their homes by the crushing oppression of their barbarous conquerors, and the classes who cultivated the lands, had been empoverished by exactions, and brought to the lowest state of degradation by the tyrannical exercise of power, which deprived them of the hard-earned fruits of their labours. Under their own Rajas, little or no protection was extended to the lower classes against the oppressions of the rich and powerful; those below a certain rank were not allowed to build a house, except with gable ends; and to construct one with two round ends, was considered high treason! It was also against orders for any but a noble, to wear a cloth reaching lower than the knee, whilst those of the Doom tribe were marked with a fish on the forehead, to prevent their being mistaken for more respectable people. In consequence of these laws, and the absence of impartial justice, a large portion of the people had been reduced to slavery by the upper classes, and the widest differences obtained in the social scale, as the Rajas, who respected no rights in their poorer subjects, were in the constant habit of willing away both men and lands, as a support for such Brahmins and noble families as could afford to make the necessary presents.

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The people, from the depressing effects of such continued oppressions, had been reduced to condition of abject wretchedness, which destroyed in them any feelings of independence and courage they may have ever possessed: those of the nobility, who retained any energy of character, were mostly noted for their barbarity and cruelty, but the greater part of them had relapsed into a state of imbecility, caused by the indulgence in profligate habits, and were in fact dependent on their slaves for subsistence. This miserable condition, so prejudicial to both rich and poor, left the country an easy prey to the more hardy tribes on the frontiers, and such of the people as possessed the necessary daring to engage in lawless habits of plunder and the violent pursuit of wealth; and it is therefore not to be wondered at, that the valley of Assam