The Peasantry and the Land Settlement.

The officers of the 29th had found game so plentiful, and the weather so fine, that they came on with us as far as Jabera, where we had the pleasure of their society on the evening of the 24th, and left them on the morning of the 25th.[1] A great many of my native friends, from among the native 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.