n English counties on
individuals, and left the immediate cultivators mere tenants-at-
will.[9] These individuals felt no interest in promoting the comfort
and welfare of the village communities, or conciliating the
affections of the cultivators, whom they never saw or wished to see;
and they let out the village, or other subdivision of their estates,
to second parties quite as little interested, who again let them out
to others, so that the system of rack-renting went on over the whole
area of the immense possession. This was a system 'more honoured in
the breach than in the observance'; for, as the great landholders
became involved in the ruin of their cultivators, their estates were
sold for arrears of revenue due to Government, and thus the
proprietary right of one individual has become divided among many,
who will have the feelings which the larger holders wanted, and so
remedy the evil. In the other extreme, Government has constituted the
immediate cultivators the proprietors; thereby preventing any one who
is supported upon the rent of land, or the profits of agricultural
stock, from rising above the grade of a peasant, and so depriving
society of one of its best and most essential elements. The remedy of
both is in village settlements, in which the estate shall be of
moderate size, and the hereditary property of the holder, descending
on the principle of a principality, by the right of primogeniture,
unaffected by the common law. This is the system which has been
adopted in the Nerbudda territory, and which, I trust, will be always
adhered to.

When we enter upon the government of any new territorial acquisition
in India, we do not require or pretend to change the civil laws of
the people; because their civil laws and their religion are in
reality one and the same, and are contained in one and the same code,
as certainly among the Hindoos, the Muhammadans, and the Parsees, as
they were among the Israelites. By these codes, and the established
usages everywhere well understood by the people, are their rights and
duties in marriage, inheritance, succession, caste, contract, and all
the other civil relations of life, ascertained; and when we displace
another Government we do not pretend to alter such rights and duties
in relation to each other, we merely change the machinery and mode of
procedure by which these rights are secured and these duties
enforced.[10]

Of criminal law no system was ever either regularly