If government extends the twenty years’ settlement now in progress to fifty years or more, they will confer a great blessing upon the people[12] and they might, perhaps, do it on the condition that the incumbent consented to allow the lease to descend undivided to his heirs by the laws of primogeniture.  To this condition all classes would readily agree, for I have heard Hindoo and Muhammadan landholders all equally lament the evil effects of the laws by which families are so quickly and inevitably broken up; and say that ’it is the duty of government to take advantage of their power as the great proprietor and leaser of all the lands to prevent the evil by declaring leases indivisible.  ‘There would then’, they say, ’be always one head to assist in maintaining the widows and orphans of deceased members, in educating his brothers and nephews; and by his influence and respectability procuring employment for them.’  In such men, with feelings of permanent interest in their estates, and in the stability of the government that secured them possession on such favourable terms, and with the means of educating their children, we should by and by find our best support, and society its best element.  The law of primogeniture at present prevails only where it is most mischievous under our rule, among the feudal chiefs, whose ancestors rose to distinction and acquired their possessions by rapine in times of invasion and civil wars.  This law among them tends to perpetuate the desire to maintain those military establishments by which the founders of their families arose, in the hope that the times of invasion and civil wars may return and open for them a similar field for exertion.  It fosters a class of powerful men, essentially and irredeemably opposed in feeling, not only to our rule, but to settled government under any rule; and the sooner the Hindoo law of inheritance is allowed by the paramount power to take its course among these feudal chiefs, the better for society.  There is always a strong tendency to it in the desire of the younger brothers to share in the loaves and fishes; and this tendency is checked only by the injudicious interposition of our authority.[13]

To give India the advantage of free institutions, or all the blessings of which she is capable under an enlightened paternal government, nothing is more essential than the supersession of this feudal aristocracy by one founded upon other bases, and, above all, upon that of the concentration of capital in commerce and manufactures.  Nothing tends so much to prevent the accumulation and concentration of capital over India as this feudal aristocracy which tends everywhere to destroy that feeling of security without which men will nowhere accumulate and concentrate it.  They do so, not only by the intrigues and combinations against the paramount power, which keep alive the dread of internal wars and foreign invasion, but by those gangs of robbers and murderers which they foster