Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎476v] (77/238)

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The Poverty of the Ray at.
habits of the people ; from their craving for amusement,
no less than from their beliefs and practice. Funerals
and weddings, fakirs and fireworks, hospitality, charity,
ceremonial observance, all combine to cause constant ex
penditure ; but all could, to a great extent at least, subsist
without that expenditure taking the shape of coin. It is
the payment of the State’s dues in specie that renders a
supply of rupees Indian silver coin also widely used in the Persian Gulf. always needful; four times a year must the
peasant pay that demand on pain of ruin. In thus fixing
his obligations, the Government has been doing what
appeared kind and just; demands once capricious and
uncertain have been fixed and limited. Let the cultivator
—whether he hold under a landlord or under the State—
pay his quit-rent at the appointed time, and all will be well;
in bad years he may fall back on the reserve accumulated in
those whose produce left a margin. The mischief is that
the idea of doing this has never entered into the people’s
heads; he never holds any reserve, and, when he wants
cash, has to get it from the “ Bunya.”
To record the whole history of Oriental revenue is not to
be attempted here ; a concise and impartial statement of
the case was attempted by the late Sir George Campbell,*
but the work is still to do. Many centuries are gone since
the geographer Strabo noticed that in the East “ all the
land is royal, and all that was done in India by the more
civilized of her rulers was to limit and define the tribute
which the Sovereign should receive from those who de
veloped the land’s resources. That was the object of Sher
Shah, Akbar, and the great Finance Minister Todar Mull.
When the East India Company, after the Battle of Buxar,
instructed their agents in Bengal to “ stand forth as Diwan,”
that system was still in force, only that in the degeneracy
of the Mughol Empire the officials of the State had mostly
withdrawn from the business of collecting the State’s
portion of the produce, devolving the duty on managers
or contractors. The ideal avowed by the founders of the
* Cobden Club Papers, 1876 .