the zamindars over their own tenants should be equally restricted. But no detailed record of tenant-right was inserted in the settlement papers, and, as a matter of fact, the cultivators lost rather than gained in security of tenure. The same English prejudice which made a landlord of the zamindar could recognize nothing but a tenant-at-will in the ryot. By two stringent regulations of 1799 and 1812 the tenant was practically put at the mercy of a rack-renting landlord. If he failed to pay his rent, however excessive, his property was rendered liable to distraint and his person to imprisonment. At the same time the operation of the revenue sale law had introduced a new race of zamindars, who were bound to their tenants by no traditions of hereditary sympathy, but whose sole object was to make a profit out of their newly purchased property. The rack-rented peasantry found no protection in the law courts until 1859, when an act was passed which restricted the landlord's powers of enhancement in certain specified cases. Later the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, since amended by an act of 1898, created various classes of privileged tenants, including one class known as "settled ryots," in which the qualifying condition is holding land, not necessarily the same land, for twelve years continuously in one village. Outside the privileged classes of tenants the act gives valuable protection to tenants-at-will. The progress in the acquisition of occupancy rights by tenants may be judged from the fact that, whereas in 1877 it was stated of the Champaran district that the cultivator had hardly acquired any permanent interest in the soil, the settlement officer in 1900 reported that 87% of the occupied area was in the possession of tenants with occupancy rights or holding at fixed rates. It is believed that the ryots will eventually be able to secure, and to hold against all comers, the strong legal position which the Bengal Tenancy Act has given them. The permanent settlement was confined to the three provinces of Bengal, Behar and Orissa, according to their boundaries at that time. Orissa proper, which was conquered from the Mahrattas in 1803, is subject to a temporary settlement, which expired in 1897 and a re-settlement was made in 1900. The enhancement in the revenue amounted to 52% of the previous demand; but in estates in which the increase was specially large it was decided to introduce the new rates gradually. The Ryotwari system.