THE INDIAN REVOLUTION. 6 L ORD Canning has done the greatest
act of his official career. An order, written with all the stately force which characterizes his pen, announces that the task from which even the haughty courage of Lord Dalhousie shrank, has been begun, and that freehold in Indian soil is hence- forward a possibility. By the side of the plan for the re- demption of the land-tax, the sale bf the wild lands; though it opens whole provinces to European enterprise, shrinks into insignificance. The latter only opens the way to new wealth, the former is the commencement of a social revolution. We will first describe the effect of the simpler innovation.
All over India the Government possesses vast tracts of land which have never been peopled, or from which the wave of population, the traces of which are still left, has from some cause receded. All the mountains, to begin with, belong to them, and the lakes, and the forests of heavy timber. Al- most all Assam, a province just twice the size of England, nearly half Chittagong, a third of Arracan, nine-tenths of Moulmein, nearly the whole of Pegu, great part of Ca- char, Sylhet, Tipperab, the slopes of the Himalayas, which extend three thousand miles in an unbroken circle, about a third of Nagpore, all the Gond country and Bheel country,—territories, in short, equal to kingdoms,— belong to them not only as rulers but as proprietors, and are as yet without inhabitants. They have inherited not only the general rights of the Mogul which gave them the moun- tains and the rivers, but the estates of a hundred princes, lands like the Nerbudda banks, with their quarries of snow- white marble, and the Malabar forests, with their million acres of teak. These districts are still unpopulated, for the Hindoo will not, as a rule, break new soil, and some of them are among the most culturable in the East. Assam, for example, with its glorious river, which for a thousand miles is broader, deeper, and swifter than the Ganges, will grow tea from end to end. So will the slopes of the Himalaya, the teas of Kangra and Darjeeling being only kept out of the market by the prices Indians are willing to give for a leaf which surpasses that of Assam as much as the Assamese surpasses that of Shanghai. The Chittagong hills, Cachar, and Sylhet, suit the plant equally well, and the tea- growing land may at this moment be estima d at an acreage which we may best describe as equal to ve Great Britains. The hill-slopes of Southern India are th natural home of the coffee-plant, while in the great desert province which stretches from Calcutta to the sea, in Orissa:, and on the wild lands of Nagpore, cotton grows to the perfection which Liverpool believes to belong only to Southern America. There is no deficiency of labour, for the native, who will not commence the work, will and does follow the European, and the wild tribes always ready to emigrate are willing to labour for pay. They have no caste, and consequently do not come into conflict with the European contempt for prejudices which interfere with work. Hitherto, in all these great regions, no European could safely invest his capital. He could never acquire a title. The stupid old Indians who till 1858 bore rule, could never be induced to part with the power of worrying. They offered most "liberal" terms, nominal rents, forest rights, all sorts of privi- leges, but no security. If the settler did not obey rules which it would take half this paper only to print, his toil and his capital disappeared in an hour, Government "resumed its grant." There is a gentleman in London now who has spent thousands in an effort to grow sea-island cotton on an:estate in the Sunderbunds. He failed, and failed, but held on, and, just as he had succeeded, the estate was swept away : he had not fulfilled some clearance condition. For it must not be forgotten that the old rules, liberal as they were, were worked by men with a caste antipathy to the settlers, who looked on them as interloper; and when the great interloper, the Governor-General, did not inter- fere, gave them no quarter. The sense of insecurity rested permanently with every grantee. Then hundreds of men in different occupations were most anxious to hold patches of mountain and jungle, and retire to them as they accumulated a competence. That was forbidden by clauses enforcing a certain amount of clearance every year. Then, of course, Indians demand in return for their suffering from the climate large profits, and tea, coffee, and other cultivations will yield them. But clearance takes years, every year the Government rental increased, and at the end of twenty years the settlers were liable to pay the rate of the district, a fair demand enough in Bengal, but ruin in Madras. So keenly has this annoyance been felt, that the Wynaad planters deliberately proposed an export duty on their own produce if only they might be let alone, and till Sir C. Trevelyan arrived were treated with an apathetic con- tempt. All this has disappeared. To the despair of the old Indians the Governor-General has abolished all the annoy- ances, and offered uncleared land at five shillings an acre. A thousand acres is enough for a great tea farm, and the upset price of' 2501. is within any planter's means. The purchases for tea will begin instantly, tea-planting being already a profession, and every successful planter settles his sons and his nephews, his friends' sons and his friends' nephews, on bits of land around him till a colony springs up in a healthy atmosphere, and in localities exempt from the fatal influence of the women of the plains, the great dread of the few fathers who have hitherto kept their sons in India. We wonder if our readers have any idea of the pecuniary temptation to engage in these cultivations. Perhaps two little stories, for the absolute accuracy of which we can vouch, may help to enlighten them. A regular tea-planter settled seven years ago in the Himalaya, and cultivated with some skill. He grew tired of it last year, and sold out, re- ceiving in cash seven times the whole capital he had laid out. About 1846, an officer, with some relatives, started a coffee- plantation in Wynaad, and spent. thereupon 4000/. It re- turned him nothing for four years, since which time it has yielded him a clear annual average of 4000/. a year—a decent return for an agricultural pursuit which admits of mountain life and field sports without end. It is within the limit of reasonable probability that in fifteen years India should be incomparably the greatest exporter of coffee, tea, and the higher descriptions of cotton. To explain the meaning of the second decree, we must state the present position of Indian tenures. We will not weary our readers with Indian terms, but simply mark the three broad facts. Throughout the empire there exist pre- cisely three acres of bond fide freehold soil, being those on which the Serampore college stands, and which are freehold by right of treaty with the Danish Government. There are rent-free lands scattered in little patches everywhere, but the legal presumption is always against them, and their owners may be required every year to prove title, the right of the English freeholder to his land till his right is dis- proved, not existing. The best tenure obtainable is that of the zemindar, or tenant-in-chief of the Crown, and that is nearly as bad as it is possible for tenure to be. -Under a law, called in India the Sunset Law, the quit-rent must be paid by sunset on quarter-day, or the whole property is put up to auc- tion and sold with a Parliamentary title. No excuse whatever, not even the death of the agent, is admitted for an hour, and scores of cases are known in which the agent has wil- fully delayed payment for a day, and bought the estate for hiMself. Fancy Chatsworth sold because the taxes were two hours in arrear. Yet that is the fate to which a man like the Maharajah of Burdwan, with estates covering counties, is liable every quarter-day. Our readers will; we doubt not, fancy there is here some mistake or exaggeration. Let them ask any Indian, and not only will the statement be confirmed, but they will be told with perfect truth that no other law would keep the land-tax in existence, and that Lord Cornwallis taxed his brain to devise milder schemes in vain.
This, we say, is the best tenure, but zemindaries are enor- mous properties, and the more usual tenure is to hold of the zemindar. Then the planter is liable, not only to be turned out by his landlord's act, but by his landlord's default. In other words, the Government sale extinguishes all sub-tenures not sixty years old. If it did not, every bankrupt zemindar would sell long leases at pepper-corn rent. Consequently it is in the power of any zemindar to demand of his tenant a sudden gift, on penalty of failing to pay his rent, and destroy- ing the lease. What can the tenant do, but pay ? He has probably expended a sum equal to the fee simple of the soil in buildings and machinery. He just pays the black-mail and puts it on to the price of his cultivation. We are bound to say native zemindars are as averse to scoundrelism of this sort as English gentlemen would be, but spendthrifts know no law, and we have known this very act done, the demand being for 30001., and this insecurity destroys the value of property. This is Bengal. In Madras there is simply no tenure possible at all, Government having the right to raise the rent every year in proportion to the improvements. It does not do it often, but a sharp collector sometimes does, and, of course, improvements become simply impossible. The right to redeem at twenty years' purchase settles all that. In Bengal the natives will not accept it, partly because their properties are in huge masses, but chiefly because they do not believe the Government will endure. But the Euro- peans will, and as property changes hands 'very rapidly— from the law of sub-division on every death transfer—they must in a hundred years become, as they are in Tirhoot, the principal lords of the soil. Once free of the collector, they can improve, buy out the cottiers, introduce new cultivations, and, what does not exist throughout India, farms of more than ten acres. Rice pays, as it is, some 175 per cent., and if Europeans could only get the land, they would obtain profits such as would once again make the nabob the rival of English gentry. The tenure is the one eternal, all-ori- ginating curse of India, the source of every dispute, the cause of every oppression, and it is the tenure which Lord Canning has had the wise audacity to attack. But we shall be asked at once, Whence is the revenue to come ? The revenue is not threatened. Government owes a debt as permanent as its land revenue. It pays 51. on every 100/. for ever. -Under the redemption law it receives 1001., instead of W. for ever, and the receipt just exactly kills the outgoing. All it loses is, in Madras only, the right to increase taxation as improvements are male—a right which has turned a third of a continent into a poor-house, inhabited by twenty-two millions of paupers, which has thrown three- fifths of the soil out of cultivation, and which has left us whole counties like Bellary to support by public works, because every three years the inhabitants, but for Government, would perish of hunger. Let any Member of Parliament who doubts what a land tenure can do to aggravate human misery, call for the records of the second of the three famines which have occurred in Bellary within the last twelve years.
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