our author gives other
similar instances. The wealthy natives who were appointed to assess and
collect the internal revenue, being unable to raise the sums required
by the government, were in many cases imprisoned, or their estates were
confiscated and re-let in order to discharge the debt.

For fifteen years the depopulation went on increasing. The children in
a community, requiring most nourishment to sustain their activity, are
those who soonest succumb to famine. "Until 1785," says our author,
"the old died off without there being any rising generation to step into
their places." From lack of cultivators, one third of the surface of
Bengal fell out of tillage and became waste land. The landed proprietors
began each "to entice away the tenants of his neighbour, by offering
protection against judicial proceedings, and farms at very low rents."
The disputes and deadly feuds which arose from this practice were,
perhaps, the least fatal of the evil results which flowed from it. For
the competition went on until, the tenants obtaining their holdings at
half-rates, the resident cultivators--who had once been the wealthiest
farmers in the country--were no longer able to complete on such terms.
They began to sell, lease, or desert their property, migrating to less
afflicted regions, or flying to the hills on the frontier to adopt a
savage life. But, in a climate like that of Northeastern India, it takes
but little time to transform a tract of untilled land into formidable
wilderness. When the functions of society are impeded, nature is swift
to assert its claims. And accordingly, in 1789, "Lord Cornwallis after
three years' vigilant inquiry, pronounced one third of the company's
territories in Bengal to be a jungle, inhabited only by wild beasts."

On the Western frontier of Beerbhoom the state of affairs was, perhaps,
most calamitous. In 1776, four acres out of every seven remained
untilled. Though in earlier times this district had been a favourite
highway for armies, by the year 1780 it had become an almost impassable
jungle. A small company of Sepoys, which in that year by heroic
exertions forced its way through, was obliged to traverse 120 miles of
trackless forest, swarming with tigers and black shaggy bears. In 1789
this jungle "continued so dense as to shut off all communication between
the two most important towns, and to cause the mails to be carried by a
circuit of fifty miles through another district."

Such a