"The proprietary rights of the sovereign, and his large and practically indefinite interest in the produce, prevent the formationof any really independent body on time land.By the distribution of the rents, which his territory produces, the monarchmaintains the most influential portion of the remaining population in the character of civil or military officers.There remainonly the inhabitants of the towns to interpose a check to his power; but the majority of these are fed by the expenditure ofthe sovereign or his servants.We shall have a fitter opportunity to point out how completely the prosperity or rather theexistence of the towns of Asia, proceeds from the local expenditure of the government.`As the citizens are thus destitutefrom their position of real strength, so the Asiatic sovereigns, having no body of powerful privileged landed proprietors tocontend with, have not had the motives which the European monarchs had: to nurse and foster.the towns into engines ofpolitical, influence, and the citizens are proverbially the most helpless and prostrate of the slaves of Asia.There exists,therefore, nothing in the society beneath him which can modify the power of a sovereign who is the supreme proprietor of aterritory cultivated by a population of ryot peasants.All that there is of real strength in such a population, looks to him asthe sole source, not merely of protection, but of subsistence; he is by his position and necessarily a despot.But the results ofAsiatic despotism have ever been the same: while it is strong it is delegated, and its power abused by its agents; when feebleand declining, that power is violently shared by its inferiors, and its stolen authority yet more abused.In its strength and inits weakness it is alike destructive of the industry and wealth of its subjects, and all the arts of peace; and it is this whichmakes that peculiar system of rents particularly objectionable and calamitous to the countries in which, it prevails."The land-tax in this system is in practice arbitrary, and thence oppressive.Mr Mill relates (.379) how the English rulerswhen they succeeded to the powers of the previous sovereigns attempted to remedy this oppression.They wished to found aclass of great landlords, that India might prosper as England has prospered under her landlords.For this purpose theypitched upon a set of tax-gatherers called Zemindars.But this plan seems to have failed.It seems now, says Mr Jones (p.118), to be generally admitted that the claims of the Zemindars were overrated, and that if something less had been done forthem and something more for the security and independence of the Ryots, the settlement, without being less just orgenerous, would have been more expedient.
But the system of cultivation in India seems on the point of undergoing a great change from causes extraneous to the ryotsystem.The Governor-General has instituted, it is recently stated, system of grants of the unoccupied land, on terms whichmake the grantees independent cultivators.The unoccupied land is wide and fertile, and thus a race of cultivators may arisewhose condition will be free from the evils of the ryot tenure.This however belongs to the Political Economy of the Future.
Transition from Cottier Rents.
I now take another case.
Ireland is cultivated in a great measure by Cottiers.Mr Mill has put these in the same chapter as the ryots of India.At this Imarvel much; for he has himself pointed out the broad differences which exist between the two systems.He truly states thatin India the payments have been regulated by custom; in Ireland by competition; a vast difference, of which he himself hasforcibly pointed out the importance.Add to this that in India the owner of the land is the sovereign; in Ireland a privateperson.And we may add furtherwhat is also a very important feature that the rent is contracted to be paid in money, not inproduce; and therefore does not vary with the amount of the crops.And this last circumstance especially has greatimportance in the progress of the country in which these systems are found.
Ryot rents have no tendency to change; they have existed in India from the time of the Greeks: probably much longer.TheCottiers' rents of Ireland offer remarkable facilities for change; Mr Jones says (p.152):
