capitals; and, as all the lands are the property of the Rajas, they
drew all those rents as revenue.[4]

Were we to take this revenue, which the Rajas now enjoy, in tribute
for the maintenance of public establishments concentrated at distant
seats, all these local establishments would, of course, be at once
disbanded; and all the effectual demand which they afford for the raw
agricultural produce of distant districts would cease. The price of
this produce would diminish in proportion, and with it the value of
the lands of the districts around such capitals. Hence the folly of
conquerors and paramount powers, from the days of the Greeks and
Romans down to those of Lord Hastings[5] and Sir John Malcolm,[6] who
were all bad political economists, supposing that conquered and ceded
territories could always be made to yield to a foreign state the same
amount of gross revenue as they had paid to their domestic
government, whatever their situation with reference to the markets
for their produce--whatever the state of their arts and their
industry--and whatever the character and extent of the local
establishments maintained out of it. The settlements of the land
revenue in all the territories acquired in Central India during the
Maratha war, which ended in 1817, were made upon the supposition that
the lands would continue to pay the same rate of rent under the new
as they had paid under the old government, uninfluenced by the
diminution of all local establishments, civil and military, to one-
tenth of what they had been; that, under the new order of things, all
the waste lands must be brought into tillage, and be able to pay as
high a rate of rent as before tillage, and, consequently, that the
aggregate available net revenue must greatly and rapidly increase.
Those who had the making of the settlements and the governing of
these new territories did not consider that the diminution of every
_establishment_ was the removal of a _market_, of an effectual demand
for land produce; and that, when all the waste lands should be
brought into tillage, the whole would deteriorate in fertility, from
the want of fallows, Under the prevailing system of agriculture,
which afforded the lands no other means of renovation from over-
cropping. The settlements of land which were made throughout our new
land acquisitions upon these fallacious assumptions of course failed.
During a series of quinquennial settlements the assessment has been
everywher