Now every practical man in India, who has had opportunities of becoming well acquainted with the matter, knows that _the reverse is the case_; that the rate of rent demandable from these cultivators _never was the same upon any two estates at the same time: nor even the same upon any one estate at different limes, or for any consecutive number of years_.[7] The rates vary every year on every estate, according to the varying circumstances that influence them--such as greater or less exhaustion of the soil, greater or less facilities of irrigation, manure, transit to market, drainage--or from fortuitous advantages on one hand, or calamities of season on the other; or many other circumstances which affect the value of the land, and the abilities of the cultivators to pay.

It is not so much the proprietors of the estate or the Government as the cultivators themselves who demand every year a readjustment of the rate demandable upon their different holdings.

This readjustment must take place; and, if there is no landlord to effect it, Government must effect it through its own officers.

Every holding becomes subdivided when the cultivating proprietor dies and leaves more than one child; and, as the whole face of the country is open and without hedges, the division is easily and speedily made.

Thus the field-map which represents an estate one year will never represent it fairly five years after; in fact, we might almost as well attempt to map the waves of the ocean as field-map the face of any considerable area in any part of India.[8] If there be any truth in my conclusions, our Government has acted unwisely in going, as it has generally done, into [one or other of] the two extremes, in its settlement of the land revenue.
In the Zamindari settlement of Bengal, it conferred the hereditary right of property over areas larger than English counties on individuals, and left the immediate cultivators mere tenants-at- will.[9] These individuals felt no interest in promoting the comfort and welfare of the village communities, or conciliating the affections of the cultivators, whom they never saw or wished to see; and they let out the village, or other subdivision of their estates, to second parties quite as little interested, who again let them out to others, so that the system of rack-renting went on over the whole area of the immense possession.