They withheld more and more of the revenue due to Government, and expended the money in building forts and strongholds, casting or purchasing cannon, and maintaining large armed bands of followers.

All that they withheld from the public treasury was laid out in providing the means for resisting the officers of Government; and, in time, it became a point of honour to pay nothing to the sovereign without first fighting with his officers.
Hadee Allee Khan's successors continued the system of transferring khalsa lands to tallookdars, as the cheapest and most effectual mode of collecting the revenue for their brief period of authority.

The tallookdars, whose estates were augmented by such transfers, in the Gonda Bahraetch district, are Ekona, Pyagpoor, Churda, Nanpoora, Gungwal, Bhinga, Bondee, Ruhooa, and the six divisions of the Gooras, or Chehdwara estate.

The hereditary possessions of the tallookdars, and, indeed, all the lands in the permanent possession of which they feel secure, are commonly very well cultivated; but those which they acquire by fraud, violence, or collusion, are not so, till, by long suffering and "hope deferred," the old proprietors have been effectually crushed or driven out of the country.

The old proprietors of the lands so transferred to the tallookdars of the Gonda Baraetch districts from time to time had, under a series of weak governors, been so crushed or driven out before 1842, and their lands had, for the most part, been brought under good tillage.
The King of Oude, in a letter, dated the 31st of August 1823, tells the Resident, "that the villages and estates of the large refractory tallookdars are as flourishing and populous as they can possibly be; and there are many estates among them which yield more than two and three times the amount at which they have been assessed; and even if troops should be stationed there, to prevent the cultivation of the land till the balances are liquidated, the tallookdars immediately come forward to give battle; and, in spite of everything, cultivate the lands of their estates, so that their profits from the land are even greater than those of the Government." This picture is a very fair one, and as applicable to the state of Oude now as in 1823.
But if a weak man, by favour, fraud, or collusion, gets possession of a small estate, as he often does, the consequences are more serious than where the strong man gets it.