ns of the Ganges and the
simpler aborigines of the hills had been devastated by the famine of
1769-70, which the Company's officials, who were powerless where they
did not intensify it by interference with trade, confessed to have cut
off from ten to twelve millions of human beings. Over three-fifths of
the area the soil was left without a cultivator. The whole young of
that generation perished, so that, even twenty years after, Lord
Cornwallis officially described one-third of Bengal as a jungle
inhabited only by wild beasts. A quarter of a century after Carey's
language was, as we have seen, "three-fifths of it are an uncultivated
jungle abandoned to wild beasts and serpents."

But the British peace, in Bengal at least, had allowed abundant crops
to work their natural result on the population. The local experience
of Shore, who had witnessed the horrors he could do so little to
relieve, had united with the statesmanship of Cornwallis to initiate a
series of administrative reforms that worked some evil, but more good,
all through Carey's time. First of all, as affecting the very
existence and the social development of the people, or their capacity
for being educated, Christianised, civilised in the highest sense,
there was the relation of the Government to the ryots ("protected
ones") and the zameendars ("landholders"). In India, as nearly all
over the world except in feudalised Britain, the state is the common
landlord in the interests of all classes who hold the soil subject to
the payment of customary rents, directly or through middlemen, to the
Government. For thirty years after Plassey the Government of India had
been learning its business, and in the process had injured both itself
and the landed classes, as much as has been done in Ireland. From a
mere trader it had been, more or less consciously, becoming a ruler. In
1786 the Court of Directors, in a famous letter, tried to arrest the
ruin which the famine had only hastened by ordering that a settlement
of the land-tax or revenue or rent be made, not with mere farmers like
the pashas of Turkey, but with the old zameendars, and that the rate be
fixed for ten years. Cornwallis and Shore took three years to make the
detailed investigations, and in 1789 the state rent-roll of Bengal
proper was fixed at L2,858,772 a year. The English peer, who was
Governor-General, at once jumped to the conclusion that this rate
should be fixed not only for ten years, but fo