e full power to act
in the courts as to buying and selling land, and other matters. If the
full power of acting on his own responsibility is to rest with the
manager, it should be distinctly so stated in the power of attorney. If
the power of direction lies with the principal solely, it should be
remembered (a fact that is not always remembered, by the way, as I know
from my own experience) that, though the manager has the power of acting
for the proprietor, he cannot do so in any degree at variance with the
instructions received. If, for instance, the proprietor orders that, in
the case of a dispute between him and another party, the manager is to
call in arbitrators to decide on certain points in a dispute, the manager
would have no right to put other points connected with the dispute to the
decision of the arbitrators, because he, the manager, might think it would
be of advantage to his principal to do so, or for any other reason
whatsoever.

The proprietor of an absentee estate is necessarily entirely in the power
of his manager; and whatever the number of accounts, reports, and returns
may be is of little consequence, as the proprietor cannot get behind them,
i.e., he cannot count the coolies that enter the estate in the morning,
and that being the case, he is wholly dependent on the honesty of the
manager. But the proprietor, it might be urged, can call for the
check-roll of people. So he can, but there is nothing to prevent the
manager keeping two check-rolls, one to pay the people with and the other
to send to the proprietor, and I have heard of this being done. Nor is
there anything to prevent a manager representing himself to be present on
the estate and attending to his duties, while in reality he may be
amusing himself fifty miles away. It is, if a little amusing, certainly
very instructive to read in "Balfour's Cyclopaedia"[59] that "coffee is
liable to fail from leaf disease, Bug, Borer, and the absence of the eye
of the owner," and the statement would have been quite complete had the
writer added that it is the absence of the eye of the owner which, in
Mysore at least, I may certainly say, is responsible for much of the leaf
disease and nearly all the Borer. But the reader will readily understand
that money is very easily frittered away in employing large bodies of
labourers unless an active personal interest is taken in seeing that full
value is obtained from them, and that their efforts are rightly direc