happiness would be better secured by the adoption of Mr. Browne's scheme than by the current Bengali system of writing that we cannot wish this scheme success. Yet in re-opening the question of Romanisation, Mr. Browne has done good service, it may be said, has contributed towards the formation of a public opinion in favour of India's entrance into su eventual Alphabet Union.

In conclusion, we have to say that a phonetic alphabet based on the Roman we wish to have for the sake of purely Indian, as well as of wider cosmopolitan, interests. The multiplicity of alphabets prevalent in India is in some measure a bar to extended intercourse among natives of different parts of the country; and these alphabets can be swept away by a modified Roman alphabet alone, and by no other.

SYAMACHARAN GANGULI.

ART. VI-THE FAMINE COMMISSION ON TENANT RIGHT IN UPPER INDIA. (Independent Section.)

HE report of the Indian Famine Commission is, on the

THE report of mewhat disappointing document. The most

valuable portion of its contents is probably the chapter devoted to "The Relation of Landlord and Tenant in Northern India," and this is mixed up with so much matter of inferior interest as to be in danger of attracting less notice than it deserves. It may, therefore, be worth while to draw attention to the utterances of the Commission on this, the most important of the many serious questions which are now demanding solution at the hands of the Government of India. They raise the same fundamental problems of which we have lately heard so much in Ireland, and of which, unless we are wise in time, we shall yet hear a great deal more in India.

The remarks with which the Commission enter on the subject and clear the ground for their practical proposals are all that any reasonable Indian land-reformer could desire. Nothing, for instance, could be more satisfactory than the following paragraph, which may be quoted entire without any apology :

"The character of the tenure, as affecting the rights and general position of the occupants of the soil, is of more vital importance in India than in countries where there are other fields of employment for the masses of the population, to which, if unable to earn a fair subsistence as tenants, they can turn for the means of livelihood and the opportunities of acquiring wealth. In India the rural population is, for the present, at any rate, bound to the soil and precluded by the general conditions of its existence from seeking in other forms of employment an escape from any hardships and oppressions to which it may be exposed by the existing system of tenure. A consideration of this fact, of the vast numbers of the persons concerned, and, what is of equal importance, of the general recognition of a limited right in the land as inherent in large classes of tenants, renders it impossible for the State, as the guardian of the common interests of the community, to leave the mutual relations of the payers and receivers of rent to adjust themselves by competition and the ordinary rules which govern commercial contracts."

It is something gained to have it thus put on record by such high authority that unrestricted competition cannot be allowed

to regulate the status of landlord and tenant. The obvious reason for this is that unrestricted competition is a fair determining principle for economic rents alone, i.e., for rents limited by the necessity of leaving the cultivator a profit sufficient to deter him from abandoning agriculture for some other pursuit. The rents paid by Indian ryots are not thus limited, for there is no other employment open to them. Therefore, their rents are not economic rents at all, and must be limited by law, not abandoned to competition, unless those who pay them are to degenerate into cottiers of the most degraded type. If this principle is accepted and carried out in its integrity, there is still room to hope that the Indian peasant, in the vivid words of Lamennais, "relevé de sa longue déchéance, cessera de trainer avee douleur ses chaines héréditaires, d'être un pur instrument de travail, une simple matière exploitable."

The report proceeds to sketch, in a way that leaves little to be desired, the origin of tenant right in India. "It has always," to quote words of which the authority would be weakened by coudensation or paraphrase, "been an accepted principle in India that the occupant of the soil is entitled to remain there from generation to generation, provided he pays the portion of the produce demanded of him by Government, or by some superior holder or landlord, and this proportion has generally been fixed by local

custom."

Exactly so; that is the common law of India which, often violated in practice, has always been accepted in theory by every ruler of Hindustan till within the last twenty years, and which, overlaid though it be by a mass of modern legislation, still survives in the conscience of the ludian people of whatever rank or grade. There is not a peasant who does not in his heart, whatever he might say in a court of justice when confronted with a powerful adversary, believe himself entitled to retain his land from generation to generation so long as he pays a fair rent for it; nor is there a landlord who would not, in any case where he was not personally interested to the contrary, admit the justice of the claim. Where the local custom by which the proportion of produce payable as rent was fixed, has decayed or become ineffectual from the introduction of the dissolvent principle of contract and commutation of grain to cash rents, its place can only be supplied by fixation of rents on the authority of Government officers. That this was the view taken by the Court of Directors towards the end of the last century is evident from their despatch to Lord Cornwallis sauctioning the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, which affirmed their duty and their intention to take care that the cultivator was not dispossessed of the land he

occupied, and that his rent was not "left to the arbitrary deternination of the zemindar." How ill the obligation thus clearly admitted has been discharged is matter of history. Is it not written in the chronicles of Behar? But the duty, though neglected, remains a duty still, and no Government has a right to plead its own lâches in bar of the demand for reform.

In 1819 the Court of Directors wrote that, "consequences the most injurious to the rights and interests of individuals had arisen from describing those with whom the Permanent Settlement was concluded as the actual proprietors of the land."

This mistake, coupled with the custom to which it gave rise, of designating the sums realised from the ryots by the zemindars as "rent," instead of as "revenue," had "introduced confusion into the whole system of tenures and given a specious colour to the pretensions of the zemindars in acting as if they were, in the ordinary sense of the words, proprietors of the land, and as if the ryots had no permanent interest but what they derived from them." The very Regulation (I. of 1793) by which the rights of the zemindars were created contained a proviso that, "it being the duty of the ruling power to protect all classes of people, more particularly those who from their situation are most helpless, the Governor-General in Council will, whenever he may deem it proper, enact such regulations as he may think necessary for the protection and welfare of the dependent taluqdars,* ryots and other cultivators of the soil;" and no objection made on this ground by any zemindar to his assessment was to be valid. As for the present state of the tenant question in Bengal, there having been no field survey and no record of village rights in that province, the respective numbers of ryots with and without a right of occupancy, and the average areas of their holdings, are unknown quantities. It must suffice to say that there are some ten millions of tenants, of whom more than six millions pay rents of less than five rupees each, from which it may be inferred that their holdings cannot exceed three acres a piece, and that in Behar, especially, illegal cesses, illegal distraint, and illegal enhancement of rent are rife.

The right of the cultivator to protection, or, to be more accurate, the duty of the ruling power to protect him, which had been thus asserted but neglected in Bengal, was to some extent reduced to practise in the North-West Provinces. In this Lew field, which came under British rule at the beginning of the present

The term taluqdur means in Bengal, a petty sub-proprietor; in the North-West Provinces, and more

especially in Oudh, it denotes a large landholder.

century, the Government protested less but did more. At the first regular settlements (1822-1833) the settlement officers drew up rent-rolls for each village, fixing the rent of every resident cultivator which, it was understood, were not to be enhanced during the terin of settlement, fixed usually for thirty years. No objections appear to have been made to this measure by the zemindars, who naturally regarded it in its real light as a matter of administrative detail, which it was of course within the competence of the Government to carry out. Excellent as this arrangement was, however, it was unhappily allowed to fall into desuetude. The fatal habit which has cost us so dear in India, of looking at all agricultural questions from the point of view of an English landlord, though it had been overcome for a time, gradually reasserted itself, and the zemindar came to be looked upon as an absolute proprietor, and his cultivators as mere tenants-at-will.

With a view probably to remedying this state of things, Act X of 1859 was introduced, which, however, established a most pernicious distinction, of which the evil effects are in full force to this day, between tenants with a right of occupancy and tenants-atwill. The former category included all who had held, or should hereafter hold, the same fields for twelve years continuously; all others were relegated to the latter. This mischievous principle survives in the North-West Provinces Reut Act of 1873, and 31 per cent, of the cultivated area is now occupied by some 1,200,000 tenants-at-will, and 41 per cent, by 1,500,000 occupancy tenants, the remaining 28 per cent, being in the direct cultivation of the proprietors.

The average area of the holdings of tenants at-will is four acres; that of the occupancy holdings 48 acres.

In the Punjab the fortunes of tenant right followed a course somewhat similar to that which they had run in the North-West Provinces. At first occupation all cultivators of any standing were declared to be possessed of a right of occupancy. But in process of time the numbers of those enjoying it were gradually diminished by the operation of the courts; and in 1868 the conditions under which an occupancy right was maintainable were defined in such a way that at present tenants-at-will number about 1,100 000, with average holdings of 59 acres, as against 540,000 holdings, averaging 6 acres, in possession of occupancy There are no rules in force under which the right can be acquired in future. In Oudh, the province from which we have taken more and to which we have given less than any other in India, the tenant

tenants.

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