in commerce and manufactures which
characterizes European--or I may take a wider range, and say
Christian societies.[1] Where, as in India, the landlords' share of
the annual returns from the soil has been always taken by the
Government as the most legitimate fund for the payment of its public
establishments; and the estates of the farmers, and the holdings of
the immediate cultivators of the soil, are liable to be subdivided in
equal shares among the sons in every succeeding generation, the land
can never aid much in giving to society that without which no society
can possibly be well organized--a gradation of rank. Were the
Government to alter the System, to give up all the rent of the lands,
and thereby convert all the farmers into proprietors of their
estates, the case would not be much altered, while the Hindoo and
Muhammadan law of inheritance remained the same; for the eternal
subdivision would still go on, and reduce all connected with the soil
to one common level; and the people would be harassed with a
multiplicity of taxes, from which they are now free, that would have
to be imposed to supply the place of the rent given up. The
agricultural capitalists who derived their incomes from the interest
of money advanced to the farmers and cultivators for subsistence and
the purchase of stock were commonly men of rank and influence in
society; but they were never a numerous class.[2] The mass of the
people in India are really not at present sensible that they pay any
taxes at all. The only necessary of life, whose price is at all
increased by taxes, is salt, and the consumer is hardly aware of this
increase. The natives never eat salted meat; and though they require
a great deal of salt, living, as they do, so much on vegetable food,
still they purchase it in such small quantities from day to day as
they require it, that they really never think of the tax that may
have been paid upon it in its progress.[3]

To understand the nature of taxation in India, an Englishman should
suppose that all the non-farming landholders of his native country
had, a century or two ago, consented to resign their property into
the hands of their sovereign, for the maintenance of his civil
functionaries, army, navy, church, and public creditors, and then
suddenly disappeared from the community, leaving to till the lands
merely the farmers and cultivators; and that their forty millions of
rent were just the sum that the Government now requ