e landholders and merchants of the country,
flocked to our camp at every stage to pay their respects, and bid me
farewell, for they never expected to see me back among them again.
They generally came out a mile or two to meet and escort us to our
tents; and much do I fear that my poor boy will never again, in any
part of the world, have the blessings of Heaven so fervently invoked
upon him by so many worthy and respectable men as met us at every
stage on our way from Jubbulpore. I am much attached to the
agricultural classes of India generally, and I have found among them
some of the best men I have ever known. The peasantry in India have
generally very good manners, and are exceedingly intelligent, from
having so much more leisure and unreserved and easy intercourse with
those above them. The constant habit of meeting and discussing
subjects connected with their own interests, in their own fields, and
'under their own fig-trees', with their landlords and Government
functionaries of all kinds and degrees, prevents their ever feeling
or appearing impudent or obtrusive; though it certainly tends to give
them stentorian voices, that often startle us when they come into our
houses to discuss the same points with us.

Nine-tenths of the immediate cultivators of the soil in India are
little farmers, who hold a lease for one or more years, as the case
may be, of their lands, which they cultivate with their own stock.
One of these cultivators, with a good plough and bullocks, and a good
character, can always get good land on moderate terms from holders of
villages.[2] Those cultivators are, I think, the best, who learn to
depend upon their stock and character for favourable terms, hold
themselves free to change their holdings when their leases expire,
and pretend not to any hereditary right in the soil. The lands are, I
think, best cultivated, and the society best constituted in India,
where the holders of estates of villages have a feeling of permanent
interest in them, an assurance of an hereditary right of property
which is liable only to the payment of a moderate Government demand,
descends undivided by the law of primogeniture, and is unaffected by
the common law, which prescribes the equal subdivision among children
of landed as well as other private property, among the Hindoos and
Muhammadans; and where the immediate cultivators hold the lands they
till by no other law than that of common specific contract.

When I spe