It is a question of very great importance, no less morally and politically than fiscally, which of these systems deserves most encouragement--that in which the Government considers the immediate cultivators to be the hereditary proprietors, and, through its own public officers, parcels out the lands among them, and adjusts the rates of rent demandable from every minute partition, as the lands become more and more subdivided by the Hindoo and Muhammadan law of inheritance; or that in which the Government considers him who holds the area of a whole village or estate collectively as the hereditary proprietor, and the immediate cultivators as his lease-tenants-- leaving the rates of rent to be adjusted among the parties without the aid of public officers, or interposing only to enforce the fulfilment of their mutual contracts. In the latter of these two systems the land will supply more and better members to the middle and higher classes of the society, and create and preserve a better feeling between them and the peasantry, or immediate cultivators of the soil; and it will occasion the re-investment upon the soil, in works of ornament and utility, of a greater portion of the annual returns of rent and profit, and a less expenditure in the costs of litigation in our civil courts, and bribery to our public officers. Those who advocate the other system, which makes the immediate cultivators the proprietors, will, for the most part, be found to reason upon false premisses--upon the assumption that the rates of rent demandable from the immediate cultivators of the soil _were everywhere limited and established by immemorial usage, in a certain sum of money per acre, or a certain share of the crop produced from it_; and that 'these rates were not only so limited and fixed, but everywhere _well known to the people_', and might, consequently, have become well known to the Government, and recorded in public registers. 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