the most abominable oppression, but through the medium of presents, and those of such amounts as fairly astonish European ears. Every man, in every department, whether civil, military, or mercantile, was in the certain receipt of splendid presents. When the government had found it necessary to forbid the receipt of presents by any individual in the service, not only for themselves, but for the Company, the highest officers set the laws at defiance, and the mischief was made more secret, but not less existent. But besides presents and official incomes, there were the farming of the revenues, and domestic trade, which opened up boundless sources of profit. The revenues were received in each district by zemindars from the ryots or husbandmen, and handed, after a fixed deduction, to the chief office of the revenue. But between these zemindars and the ryots were aumils, or other inferior officers, who farmed the revenues in each lesser district or village; that is, contracted with the zemindars for the revenues at a certain sum, and took the trouble of exacting them from the ryots, who paid a rate fixed by law or ancient custom, and could not be turned out of their lands while such rate was regularly paid. Wherever the English obtained a claim over the revenues of a prince, which we have seen they speedily did, they soon became the zemindars, or their agents, the aumils, or other middlemen between them and the ryots. Anciently, the ryots paid one tenth of their produce, for all their taxes were paid in kind, but in time the rate grew to more than half. When the English power became more fixed and open, and it was found that under the native zemindars the exactions of the revenues did not at all satisfy their demands, they took on themselves the whole business of collecting these revenues. This, as we shall see, on the evidence of the Company’s own officers, became a dreadful system to the people. The Mahomedan exactions had been generally regarded more considerate than those of the native Hindu chiefs; but the grinding pressure of the English system brought on the unfortunate ryot the most unexampled misery. Of this, however, anon. It only requires here to be pointed out as one of the various sources of enormous profits and jobbing which made India so irresistibly attractive to Englishmen.