THE LAND-REVENUE OF INDIA.

TO WM RDITOR OF TER SPECTATOR.

SIR—Having been absent from England, I did not see till very recently the articles upon " Organization in Agriculture" in your numbers of the 15th and 22d of last month. c .

Permit me to say with reference to those articles, that you do not appear to me to have a correct notion of what you denominate " the land-tax "in British India, in respect either to the facts of the case, or to the bearing of what I would call the land-revenue system which obtains in that country, upon the coat of exportable produce. The revenue which the Government of that country derives from the land is, in truth, not a tax at all, but a part of the rent. In India, the rent of the soil (appropriated in Europe by private individuals from the period whenthe Sove- reign and the holders under feudal tenures succeeded in shifting their liabilities to the State upon the less powerful and more patient community) has never been private property. It is the fund which has been set apart from time immemorial fur the maintenance of the Government in all its functions and responsibilities. It never belonged to any party related to the soil, more than it did to the banker, the manufacturer, or the artisan of the town. It belonged to the community, and was and is administered by the ruling power for the general benefit, more or less faithfully, according to its sense of its responsibilities. This is no new doctrine of mine. It is a position long ago taken up, and fully proved, by one whose au- thority will, I am sure, command your respectful consideration,—the late Mr. James Mill. -

Now, I will not occupy your columns by entering upon a disquisition upon the nature and incidence of rent. Mr. Ricardo, with whom I believe most political economists of the present day are agreed upon the point, says that " corn is not dear because rent a paid, lantent is paid because corn is dear." If .4sbp,so,

and if I be justified, iii A eat the Indian land-revenue is a pere bT- the

i 3;1746, rent, the circumstance, . "Te' eiloVernment receives it instead of piiiithiirl- dividuals cannot, it a uiliftel,in the least degree the cost of proditc-

lion eitlter of cotton" ' i4lierively with other. articles. But, waiving

thisquestion, it. in elealiVerse-Sseiketber, rent do or do not; enter into root--that whenever in any countabsoeialt circamstances are such that tenor-yields a rent, so power on earth can, pr.nopiit- that rent from being taken by some party, any more than it can prevent The sun from rising.

' British India is in that position—owing; as I need scarcely say, to the effective demand of an immense population for the edible products of the soil; and there- fore if the Government were to give up its land-revenue, either in whole or in part, either generally or on particular articles, the production of which it might be desired to favour, the only result would be, that the amount so abandoned would go into the pockets of the agricultural classes, to the detriment of the other classes of the commuuity ; who would thus not merely lose their lien upon what really belongs to them quite as much as it does to the agriculturists, but must necessarily be taxed to make up the deficiency. The reason, then, why cotton is not more largely supplied to us by British India, I take to be simply this—that owing to the circumstance of effective ' demand above stated, the cultivator finds it more profitable to raise other articles. The land-revenue, if it press at all, (in Ricardo's theory of rent,) does not press more heavily upon cotton than it does upon other produce. If, consequently, the land- revenue were generally reduced, the relations of profit would remain the same, and no greater breadth of land would be devoted to cotton. I presume that you would hardly recommend that the growth of that, or of any other article, should be stimulated by special exemption. If this were attempted—besides other obvious objections—the collector of the land-revenue would require an army of troublesome, corrupt, and extorting underlings, to ascertain, annually, that the plots of land so favoured were not tamed to other uses.

I apprehend that land in America, except in the immediate neighbourhood o the principal seats of a population utterly disproportioned to the enormous ex- tent of fertile soil, is not in a position to yield rent. If rent enter into cost, (and it must be taken into account in estimating the relative powers of cheap produc- tion possessed by two countries,) this circumstance is doubtless one great cause why America can grow cotton cheaper than British India. But, however ear- nestly we may desire to reverse matters in that respect, it is impossible to effect this object by getting rid of rent in India.

i

If in any part of India the land-revenue is excessive, (that is, if it exceed, in your own words, "a rent paid for the use of land, and subject to be fixed by con- tract,") or if it be, in practice, "a land-tax varying or which has a tendency. to vary with the crop," in either case, such a state of things must interfere most in- juriously with production; but not, I apprehend, so as to discourage specially the growth of cotton. Both these, however, are acknowledged abuses,'not a part of the system. They are abuses which the authorities, both in India and in this country, (see Lord Auckland's very able Minute on the Growth of Cotton,) have exerted themselves most strenuously to correct, whenever they can by possibility manifest themselves. But in several of the largest and most fertile provinces the land-revenue has long been fixed in perpetuity. In others, equally or more ex- tensive, it has been settled for twenty-five or thirty years. In either case, there is no more interference on the part of the Government with the free will of the cultivator in respect to the nature of his crops than there is in this country.

Measures are in progress to the same end in all the other provinces. When the sound system of ascertaining the fair rent, as it would be " fixed by contract," and taking a certain proportion of that as the public revenue, has been univer- sally extended, there will not, in my humble judgment, be left the shadow of a ground for attributing the inability of India to cope with America in the growth of cotton in the smallest degree to the system of land-revenue which obtains in. the former country.

In another point I think that you are mistaken. Yoa speak of " the valley of the Ganges" as possessing " the finest soil and the finest climate in the world"; and that, consequently, soil and climate do not explain why. the Hindon rears less productive and more expensive crops of cotton, auger, and tobacco, than the West Indian or the American of the continent." But if you will look at the evi- dence given this session before a Committee of the House of Commons, by English- men who have been engaged in growing sugar in India, you will find that -they state, that after using all the means and appliances in their power, their produce per acre fell very greatly short of the average returns in the Weat Indies. I have no doubt that even the virgin soils of India are very inferior to those of the Western hemisphere; and in a country so-peopled for many centuries, virgin soils are to be found only in localities very remote from roads or water-carriage. Another item to be taken into account in the comparison is, that the labour of British India, from the physical character of the people, is much less effective than that of the Negro. /Our argument assumes equality in this respect. OStensible wages are, doubtless, low in India; but the amount of work done by a labourer is very small.

Permit me to add, that I believe you to be in error also in stating that " the land-tax is now confessedly a ruinous impost, and is only retained because those who levy it do not know where to look for a substitute": on the contrary, I am of opinion that, with reference to the fact that the rent of land was never private .property in India, no other plan so unobjectionable of providing for the necessity of the state could possibly be devised: it is in truth the simple appropriation to the wants of society of a fund created by that society, and which but for that society could never have existed; and to endow the landholders in this country with the tithe would be a trifle in respect to injustice to the community, compared with the robbery that would be committed by the substitution in India of any European scheme of taxation for the system of laud-revenue. You state that " American competition throws the land of India out of cultiva- tion." Perhaps you mean only the cultivation of cotton. I am not sure that you are right even with that limitation. But if you intend to assert—as some have asserted—that the effect of the land-revenue system, as administered by the Bri- tish Government, has been to throw land out of cultivation, the facts of the case are entirely against you. The extension of cultivation throughout British India during the last fifty years has been enormous; and I believe that it is still pro- ceeding in an accelerating ratio. Lastly, I observe that you attribute " the condition of our fellow subjects in India," (which you call a "melancholy theme,") and, apparently, "the decimation of the Population by periodical famines," to the land-revenue system. The circumstances of the case, in both respects, may be abundantly accounted for by other causes ; and I believe that it would be impossible to show that the mode of raising the public re- venue has the smallest bearing upon them. Tbe ryots of the provinces, the revenue of which was settled in perpetuity more than fifty years ago, and where the land- holder gets, on the average, probably twice as much in rent as he pays to the Government in revenue, are certainly not in a better condition—I believe, indeed, that they are worse off—than the ryots of the Other provinces. Their depressed condition, and their liability to suffer from famine, arise mainly from social cir- cumstances. They are petty cettlers, not working for wages, but each cultivat- ing and depending for subsistence on his little nook of land. If his own crop fail, as must be the case when there is a short fall of rain, he has no resource but public or private charity. In default of that, he must starve. Doubtless,- better roads for the carriage of grain, and larger and more general works for irrigation, would lessen the frequency, and narrow the sweep of such frightful visitations. But the accident that the State receives a large proportion of the rent of the land, has no more to do with the famine than it has to do with the indications of the 'pluviometer.

[Though our correspondent is known to us as not only of the highest per- sonal respectability, but of extensive knowledge and experience in the affairs of India, we cannot accept his reading of the matters in question.

In thelast article in the Spectator (to which the writer does not allude) we ex- pressly.distinguished between• land-tax, and rent. Rent 4t,an open agreement made in the market' and tests the value of land: a land-tar is an assessment not Open to contract, antis arbitrarily imposed upon the cultivator of the soil; who has never in India been allowed to bargain, but who is in the hands of the col- lector. Of course, if such a tax be oppressive and injadiCious, its age does not justify The assertion that the Indian Government has not an undisputed claim to the ownership of the soil, was not first advanced by us. Mr. Horace Wilson, in his Con- tinuation of Mill's History of British India, declares his conviction that the notion of the Government being owners of the soil is not of older tradition in India than the'second lelohamedan conquest. The same was also assumed by the Mahiatta predatory chiefs, who will hardly be taken as judicial guarantees; and indeed, we might ask, to what but to similar encroachments did the Indian governments which we have supplanted owe their fall ?

Mr. Ricardo's theory of rent (which was never received out of England as a prac- tical doctrine) has long since been demolished by the Reverend Richard Jones, of Haileybury, whose work on rent is acknowledged as authority all over Europe.

Cotton has at all times been grown in the East Indies for exportation as well as for home consumption, at a far less remunerating price than the American planter requires; and now, on favoured soils and situations, it is actually pro- duced at Id. per pound. The lid. raised as land-tax, enormous as it is, would perhaps not discourage so much as to cause the discontinuanCe of the cotton crop, were it not for the inquisitive nature of a variable land or produce tax, the incon- venience of the advance, and the oppressions with which its collection has repeat- edly been shown to be accompanied. Food must be grown, under any impost however tyrannical. Cotton will only be cultivated ander a calculation of profit to be made by its cultivation.

Lord Auckland's published assertion, that the assessment is equal and invari- able throughout the Company's jurisdiction, seems to be controverted by the writer's assertion above, that the land-tax is a rent, and consequently a matter of contract. • Our authority for stating that cotton lands had been thrown out of cultivation, was a circular issued some time back by the respected house of Forbes and Co. of Bombay, in which we find—" The'crop of Surat and Baroach cotton this year will not be large; and 8,000 acres in the Baroach district alone are believed to be taken out of cotton cultivation, the prices now ruling not remunerating the culti- vators." This was written in 1843; and the decline of the cotton cultivation is stated in 1846 to be the motive for appointing the Committee of inquiry at Boni bay. In the great subdivision of the soil we have the root of the evil. A land- tax of the nature of that raised in India can only be levied on cattier tenants. No powerful landed interest ever submitted to anything of the kind. In our open- ing article we showed that this experience was confirmed by the history of the Continent of Europe; and that our Indian financial system was in the same di- lemma with that of France, Prussia, Austria; and other countries, which, popu- lous and enlightened as they are, Cannet.adeaancander the incubus of such a tax, although very much• toeddierb teotappizekAitil the Indian land-assessment.

The absorption of the labour of a whole population in agriculture on the cottier scale is an abuse of power.

The assessment is the cause of distress, because it induces the small cultiva- tion which is bad economy. It is notorious that the breaking-up of large landed properties in India into small allotments is looked upon as a favonrable circum- stance for the revenue in India.—ED.]