During the five years of British occupation (1811-1816) Sir Stamford Raffles was Lieutenant-Governor. He at once introduced reforms. The native princes were displaced; the village community, with its common property and patriarchal government, was modified; a system of criminal and civil justice, similar to that in force in India, in which a European judge sat with native assessors, was introduced; the peasants were given proprietary rights in the soil they cultivated; and complete political and commercial liberty was established. An inquiry into the nature of the respective rights in the soil of the cultivator, the native princes, and the Government resulted in establishing the fact that, of the subject territory the Government was sole owner of seven-tenths. Of the remainder, two-tenths belonged to the Preanger Regents, and one-tenth was occupied by private estates, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Buitenzorg and Batavia. In order to teach the native the western virtues of industry and independence, Raffles determined to introduce the Ryotwarree system. The property in the land vested in the Government was handed over to individual peasant proprietors. In return for his land each proprietor was made individually and personally responsible for the payment of his land tax, and his land was liable to be sold in satisfaction of his public or private debts. [Footnote 16: 12 florins = £1.] Before the English administration the peasant had paid--(1) a land rent for his rice lands to the native princes, amounting to a sum equivalent to one-half of the produce of sawah (irrigated) and one-third of tegal (unirrigated) lands; and (2) a tax of forced labour to the Dutch Government, which took the form of unpaid labour in the cultivation of the produce for export. Raffles abolished both, and in place of them he established a fixed money payment equivalent to a much smaller proportion of the produce of the land than had been paid before to the native princes alone. The Dutch regained their East Indian possessions by the Treaty of London. On their return to Java, they restored the village community with its joint ownership and joint liability, and abolished all proprietary rights of the natives in the soil, only allowing ownership of land to Europeans. They contend that this attempt of Raffles to apply Western principles to an Eastern society had already proved disastrous. The peasants, on the one hand, had not acquired the habits necessary for the successful development of their holdings, but, on the other, through their inability to pay the land rent, were becoming hopelessly involved in debt to the Chinese and Arab money-lenders. The broad fact, however, remains that during the short period of British rule the revenue rose from three and a half to seven and a half million florins, and the population from four to five and a half millions.