Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎478r] (80/238)

The Poverty of the Ray at.
293
labour so strenuously bestowed is not merely lost, but often
made an instrument of evil.
It is for this reason that the efforts of the “ Union ” men
tioned above are to be regarded as promising of benefit to
India. Under the rule of the Old East India Company,
now almost passed from recollection, abuses were by no
means rare, but a remedy was never far remote. Every
twenty years the Company’s charter lapsed, and ere it
could be renewed a long discussion occurred, alike in Parlia
ment and in the press. Were such consultations held in the
present day they would be doubtless founded on a searching
inquiry such as is urged by the “ Union.” It is impossible
to predict with any certainty what the result of such an
inquiry would be. It might show that all which ought to
be known in regard to the condition of the Rayat was already
established, and that the Government could effect nothing
more for his protection against distress and debt. On the
other hand, it might be shown that the Rayat was most
prosperous and contented in Bengal; that the element of
perpetuity in the demand was indeed the flaw that Campbell
called it, and not the panacea contemplated by the Con
gress ;* but that, apart from this, the prosperity of Bengal
was attributable to the nature of the land-revenue system.
Almost alone in British India, the old provinces in this
lieutenancy raise their share of the rent from middlemen,
and the actual cultivator is spared the trouble and anxiety
involved in the office of Malguzar.
* “A financial mistake,” the sometime Governor calls it, and “a sin
against posterity .”—{Systems of Land-Tenure, edited for the Cobden Club
by J. W. Probyn, p. 145 ).