In the latter of these two
systems the land will supply more and better members to the middle
and higher classes of the society, and create and preserve a better
feeling between them and the peasantry, or immediate cultivators of
the soil; and it will occasion the re-investment upon the soil, in
works of ornament and utility, of a greater portion of the annual
returns of rent and profit, and a less expenditure in the costs of
litigation in our civil courts, and bribery to our public officers.
Those who advocate the other system, which makes the immediate
cultivators the proprietors, will, for the most part, be found to
reason upon false premisses--upon the assumption that the rates of
rent demandable from the immediate cultivators of the soil _were
everywhere limited and established by immemorial usage, in a certain
sum of money per acre, or a certain share of the crop produced from
it_; and that 'these rates were not only so limited and fixed, but
everywhere _well known to the people_', and might, consequently, have
become well known to the Government, and recorded in public
registers. Now every practical man in India, who has had
opportunities of becoming well acquainted with the matter, knows that
_the reverse is the case_; that the rate of rent demandable from
these cultivators _never was the same upon any two estates at the
same time: nor even the same upon any one estate at different limes,
or for any consecutive number of years_.
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