THE CASE OF THE ENGLISH IN INDIA. MAE cotton trade
seems disposed to occupy its compulsory leisure by opening a Parliamentary campaign on India. The Manchester Chamber of Commerce has already condemned Sir Charles Wood. Mr. Laing has fred off a pamphlet which, under all its oily moderation, is a bill of indictment, and crowded meet- ings of masters and operatives, held on Monday, at Darwen and Oldham, passed resolutions pledging themselves to an extensive programme of Indian reform. The object of all the speakers, though sometimes concealed under vague or ill-tempered resolutions, is obviously to remove the obstacles which, as they believe, impede the settlement of Europeans in India, and it may be as well to point out what those obstacles really are, and so prevent, as far as possible, that aimlessness which so often baffles the efforts of Indian reformers. Stripped of the preposterous terminology which Indians, like doctors and Scotch lawyers, employ in order to guard their monopoly of knowledge, the questions at issue are within the grasp of any decently thoughtful man. There are just two obstacles to English settlement in the Gangetic valley—the difficulty of acquiring land and the delay in obtaining civil justice.
John Smith, energetic, Anglo-Saxon, and twenty-five, with some knowledge of Bengal, and a capital of three thousand pounds, resolves, after two years' residence, to try his luck with the
land. He has a notion that, with his energy and brains and European knowledge, he can so develop cultivation as to make a fortune in a very few years, while in the mean- time enriching all around him. No matter what the cultivation, indigo, or cotton, or sugar, or cocoanuts, pr toddy palms, or even rice, he knows he can make more of it than the half-shiftless race around him, and he looks round for land. Of course, he prefers the settled districts, where labour is plentiful and supplies are certain, and doctors are not unknown, and his wife can once a week find another white woman to speak to and criticize her bonnet. What he wants is a freehold farm, but he very soon finds there is no such thing to be had. Fee simple as a tenure does not exist, but instead, there is a. form of lease which is prima facie exceedingly favourable to the speculator. There is but one form in India, viz., a per- petual lease never to be cancelled by the landlord while certain rents are paid, but voidable at will by the tenant, who has only to surrender the farm to be free of all obli- gation. That looks tempting ; but then John Smith wants the land to himself, to cultivate through hired labour, and he at once finds a difficulty in the way. The whole land is already settled, covered with clouds of cottiers as thick as flies, who under a thousand names have really only two kinds of holding.. They have all perpetual leases, but One class being older than British rule are exempt from any rise in rent, the other are liable to pay any rent that is "reasonable and customary." To get the land actually, as well as nominally, to himself, John Smith must oust these men, who look on him as Tipperary._ cottiers look on a Scotch arrival, and detest him, his honesty, his creed, and his worrying, newfangled ways. The here- ditary cottiers he cannot disturb, for they would not sell if he plated the land with sovereigns, and having some faint know- ledge of India he probably does not try. The others he can buy out with infinite trouble, simplified by the fact that land in Bengal is transferable with as little cost as a watch. Having bought out say one hundred families, he finds himself in this unique position. He has got; say 1,000 acres, for which he pays a moderate rent,. liable to increase, but only up to a tolerably well understood level. He proposes, therefore, to begin operations, build vats, erect sugar mills, import machinery, begin drainage, hire labour, and com- mence what not of different forms of investment. Before he com- mences, however, he inquires about his title, and after a week's- study he finds that, right across his path, stands the one monster evil of Bengal, the terrible revenue law.
He holds his land of a sub-tenant, who holds it of a tenant-in- chief, who holds it of the Crown, and consequently the primary, law affecting his property is that which guards the Crown rent. That rent being important to the State, has been guarded by the Legislature by two provisions not existing, we believe, in any other country on earth. To ensure the punctuality which Asiatics detest, but which is the life of English finance,. the State has decreed that if the Crown rent of any estate is not paid by sunset of quarter-day the land shall be put up to auction with a Parliamentary—ix., an indefeasible title. If the State does not get the rent out of the tenant, it does not worry itself by distraint, but simply transfers the tenure. This, of course,. -produces punctuality, but the rule would be of no use if the de- faulting tenant had granted leases. The estate might not be worth buying. Consequently, another decree enacts that when land ia. so sold the collector's hammer annuls all existing sub-tenures, save- only those of the hereditary cottiers. So that John Smith, alter- spending his three thousand pounds, may be stripped of his land by the failure of a man he never saw, to whom he pays no rent,. who lives usually three hundred miles off, and over whom he has not the faintest right of control. Moreover, that tenant-in- chief can, if he likes, write to John, and say that if he does not lend him some money, he (said tenant-in-chief) shall fail to pay his rent, and at the sale buy in his own land cleared of all sub- tenures. The writer has known this done on a colossal scale—the demand being for a present of 3,000/., under penalty of the loss of a holding covered with factories worth 50,000/. John shrinks. back appalled, and recognizes for the first time that fanning in India is under the existing tenure impossible,—that capital cannot,. except by the tenant-in-chief, be safely sunk in land.
So he tries, being an energetic, troublesome, half-cultivated person, to become tenant-in-chief, and, if he is very lucky and can borrow money, he does become one. His former difficulty is, of course, at an end, but a new one arises. He has got a white elephant. Tenancies-in-chief cannot be split, except under some rare circum- stances, the State liking best to take its rent in lumps, and he has fifty times as much land as he can farm. He must let his tenants be. If he is a very wise man he contents himself with his rents, which he can always exact—rent process being swift, cheap, and cruel—racks his people to pauperism, and walks home in twenty years with fifty or sixty thousand pounds. But John is seldom wise. He does not like racking, hates wasteful cultivation, and sees an untold wealth of resources undeveloped around. Accord- ingly, he tries to induce his tenantry to cultivate for him, giving him, perhaps, produce in lieu of rent, and then his troubles begin. He cannot levy his produce under the terrible rent laws, and for him there is practically no other form of civil justice. The Court is forty miles off, every process is conducted on the old chancery system, written pleadings, written plea and answer, rejoinder and surrejoinder, three appeals, and so on ad infinitum, to be all gone through separately in, say 6,000 cases a year. If heisan ordinary man he walks off, leaving India to be developed by somebody else. If he is an extraordinary man, with no superfluity of conscience, he goes half mad, breaks his tenants heads, burns their houses, lets his underlings swear alibis to any extent,—and, we regret to say, prospers exceedingly. The Asiatic crouches at once to force un- scrupulously applied, and till he rises and flies at the planter's throat, seems the most docile of lambs. The prosperity lasts, however, only while John Smith remains in Bengal. In about twelve years he "gets liver," or catches the "English fever," that subtle mysterious hate of India and its people which is as irresistible as madness, and under which men of all ranks every day throw prospects and duties and wealth to the winds, rather than remain another hour in the "accursed land." The day he departs his property is comparatively valueless, for his agent has only accidentally or wilfully to mias paying rent by twelve hours, and the Sunset Law strips his employer of the estate, leaving him only the price obtainable at a forced and often fraudulent sale. We challenge any Indian to point out the faintest exaggeration in that sketch, and ask whether our readers now understand why Europeans want the power of redeeming the land-tax, and crave for civil justice of an over summary kind.
Well, poor John Smith, half heart-broken, thinks he will change his settlement. He will go to some wild province where there are no ancient tenures, grow tea in .Assam (an England with two people to the square mile) or on the Himalayas, with one to the square league, or cultivate cotton in the Sunderbunds, the vast desolate province south of Calcutta, with a population of two per county. There he can attract new labour, and farm like an English land- lord. An Indian Secretary, who happened, by a miracle, to have travelled in India, in a sudden fit of inspiration, said, "Go, and God be with you. These provinces are of no use. Choose your location, and you shall have 3,000 acres,—not more,—at a price, to be yours forever. Only remember, if you get rich I shall tax your beer and your tea, and your income, and your shirts, and every- thing that is yours, wife's ribbons specially included, except your land." John accepts the terms with a sense that Astrtea has re- turned to earth, and an emotion towards Lord Stanley which makes every Indian a Tory merely to get him back again, and starts. He has just arrived, when a new Indian Secretary, who does not know India, suddenly cries out, "Wait a bit. How do I know some native's rights won't be imperilled? There must be an inquiry about that, and a survey, and then the land must be put up to auction? John stands aghast. He knows that survey is impos- sible under five years, from want of disposable surveyors (who are fourteen hundred miles off, plotting out a Bengal county on a scheme absolutely perfect, and which will be finished before A.D. 1,900), and that " inquiry " means bribing the native sent to inquire. He, however, would bear all that, and wait, if he had right of pre-emption; but after building his house and planting his tea, and importing his Chinese overseers, 'and civilizing the nearest nomads into overpaid labourers, his plot of ground is to be put up to the highest bidder ! That is, he is to pay at auction for his own improvements! John won't do it, and retreats, to recom- mence the weary task of coercing native tenants into improve- ments which they do not want, and which he had better, for his soul's sake, let alone. Do our readers comprehend why Sir Charles Wood's "changes of detail" really destroyed Lord Stanley's magnificent reform ?
On one point, which Sir Charls Wood is always bringing up, he is probably in the right. It was essential in the settled territories to guard the rights of commonage, sometimes included by ignorant people under the head of waste lands. But an order to the Vice- roy to protect that point would have been amply sufficient ; every magistrate and collector hating the troublesome, fractious go-a- head Anglo-Saxon, and being quite anxious enough to use native rights as a weapon against him; and all details should have been left
to Lord Elgin. Naturally a knot of old Indians, sitting in a West- minster hotel, and paid 1,200/. a year each to criticize Indian politics, will not leave the details alone, and so improvement in India stops, and will stop, till they are cleared out of the way, and principles left to the Parliamentary Secretary and details to the Viceroy.
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