r ever. The experienced
Bengal civilian protested that to do that would be madness when a third
of the rich province was out of cultivation, and as to the rest its
value was but little known, and its estates were without reliable
survey or boundaries.

We can now see that, as usual, both were right in what they asserted
and wrong in what they denied. The principle of fixity of tenure and
tax cannot be over-estimated in its economic, social, and political
value, but it should have been applied to the village communities and
cultivating peasants without the intervention of middlemen other than
the large ancestral landholders with hereditary rights, and that on the
standard of corn rents. Cornwallis had it in his power thus to do what
some years afterwards Stein did in Prussia, with the result seen in the
present German people and empire. The dispute as to a permanent or a
decennial settlement was referred home, and Pitt, aided by Dundas and
Charles Grant, took a week to consider it. His verdict was given in
favour of feudalism. Eight months before Carey landed at Calcutta the
settlement had been declared perpetual; in 1795 it was extended to
Benares also.

During the next twenty years mismanagement and debt revolutionised the
landed interest, as in France at the same time, but in a very different
direction. The customary rights of the peasant proprietors had been
legislatively secured by reserving to the Governor-General the power
"to enact such regulations as he may think necessary for the protection
and welfare of the dependent talookdars, ryots, and other cultivators
of the soil." The peasants continued long to be so few that there was
competition for them; the process of extortion with the aid of the
courts had hardly begun when they were many, and the zameendars were
burdened with charges for the police. But in 1799 and again in 1812
the state, trembling for its rent, gave the zameendars further
authority. The principle of permanence of assessment so far
co-operated with the splendid fertility of the Ganges valley and the
peaceful multiplication of the people and spread of cultivation, that
all through the wars and annexations, up to the close of the Mutiny, it
was Bengal which enabled England to extend the empire up to its natural
limits from the two seas to the Himalaya. But in 1859 the first
attempt was made by the famous Act X. to check the rack-renting power
of the zameendars. And now, more than a c