Those who advocate the other system, which makes the immediate
cultivators the proprietors, will, for the most part, be found to
reason upon false premisses--upon the assumption that the rates of
rent demandable from the immediate cultivators of the soil _were
everywhere limited and established by immemorial usage, in a certain
sum of money per acre, or a certain share of the crop produced from
it_; and that 'these rates were not only so limited and fixed, but
everywhere _well known to the people_', and might, consequently, have
become well known to the Government, and recorded in public
registers. Now every practical man in India, who has had
opportunities of becoming well acquainted with the matter, knows that
_the reverse is the case_; that the rate of rent demandable from
these cultivators _never was the same upon any two estates at the
same time: nor even the same upon any one estate at different limes,
or for any consecutive number of years_.[7] The rates vary every year
on every estate, according to the varying circumstances that
influence them--such as greater or less exhaustion of the soil,
greater or less facilities of irrigation, manure, transit to market,
drainage--or from fortuitous advantages on one hand, or calamities of
season on the other; or many other circumstances which affect the
value of the land, and the abilities of the cultivators to pay. It is
not so much the proprietors of the estate or the Government as the
cultivators themselves who demand every year a readjustment of the
rate demandable upon their different holdings. This readjustment must
take place; and, if there is no landlord to effect it, Government
must effect it through its own officers. Every holding becomes
subdivided when the cultivating proprietor dies and leaves more than
one child; and, as the whole face of the country is open and without
hedges, the division is easily and speedily made. Thus the field-map
which represents an estate one year will never represent it fairly
five years after; in fact, we might almost as well attempt to map the
waves of the ocean as field-map the face of any considerable area in
any part of India.[8]

If there be any truth in my conclusions, our Government has acted
unwisely in going, as it has generally done, into [one or other of]
the two extremes, in its settlement of the land revenue.

In the Zamindari settlement of Bengal, it conferred the hereditary
right of property over areas larger tha