though perhaps fewer, political supporters, amongst the land-owning classes.  The old Congress platform was, moreover, drawn up by and for the intelligentsia of the towns, who had little in common with the great rural population of India; and in so far as it professed to champion also the agricultural interests of the country, it preferred to concentrate its attacks on the general system of Indian land revenue and to press for its revision on the lines of the “permanent settlement” in Bengal—­not so much perhaps on account of any intrinsic merits of that “settlement,” as because it was identified with the province which was then regarded as in the van of Indian political progress and enlightenment.  The “permanent settlement” in Bengal, effected more than a century and a quarter ago by Lord Cornwallis under a complete misapprehension, as was afterwards realised, of the position of the Bengalee zemindars, determined once and for all the proportion of land revenue which Government was entitled to collect in the province, instead of leaving it, as in other parts of India it is still left, to be varied from time to time after periodical inquiry into the constantly varying yield and value of the land.  The result in Bengal has been highly satisfactory from the point of view of the large land-owners whose property has appreciated enormously with the general growth of prosperity during a long period, unprecedented in its earlier annals, of internal and external peace.  It has been less satisfactory to the tenants with inferior and infinitely subdivided interests who have shared very little in the increased wealth of their superior landlords, and nowhere else has sub-infeudation been carried to such extravagant lengths.  But for the State, above all, the results have been singularly unfortunate, as it has debarred itself from taking toll of the unearned increment that has been constantly accruing to the zemindars.

So long as the National Congress saw little or no hope of securing the transfer of any substantial share in the governance of the country to Indian shoulders, it could afford to indulge in wholesale criticism of Government finance and to propose sweeping changes without stopping to consider ways and means or to weigh the ultimate effects upon the revenue of the State, and it was easy for it to court popularity by inveighing against the land tax and advocating the extension of the “permanent settlement” to the whole of India as a sovereign panacea.  But sober Indian politicians have begun to look farther ahead and to reckon with the costs of the many popular reforms which Indian Ministers will be expected to carry through in the new Councils.  Mr. Gandhi and his followers, who are determined if possible to wreck them, are deterred by no such considerations, and the non-payment of the land tax, which must remain the backbone of Indian revenue, already figures in their programme of “Non-co-operation,” of which the avowed object is to paralyse Government