a perfect title exhaustive of all previously existing rights and encumbrances. With regard to the other revenue duties of a commissioner, they are more easily enumerated than they can be described or made intelligible. He has to provide for the management of the estates of minors, lunatics, and others, which have come under the control of the Court of Wards. He has to keep an eye on the great gains or losses arising from alluvion and diluvion along the banks of the huge rivers which sweep through Bengal, changing their courses and washing away their banks, not merely by a few yards, but sometimes by miles at a time. The commissioner has to look after the excise revenue of the districts under him. He must take thought regarding the application of the stamp laws, and be prepared to explain to the Board of Revenue the reason why the stamp revenue increases in one district and decreases in another district. This is sometimes a rather difficult task, as the collector in whose district an increase is shown blandly attributes it to the abundance of the harvest; whilst, unfortunately, the collector of the district in which a decrease appears also attributes the decrease to the abundance of the harvest; and though it is perfectly possible that there may be some truth in each of these explanations, it will not do for the commissioner to send up both explanations to the Board in their conflicting nudity and crudity. The commissioner has also to superintend the collection of that very curious tax which is known under the name of the license-tax. It is the only existing form of direct personal taxation, and is apparently called the license-tax because the Government was not permitted to call it an income-tax. A previous Government had taken much credit to itself for the abolition of the income-tax, and neither political party in England is now willing to allow itself to be connected with the re-imposition of the income-tax. But as some sort of direct taxation was deemed necessary, and is admittedly necessary, in order to reach the rich trading classes, it was introduced under the name of a license-tax, whilst it is only a disguised and deformed income-tax, utterly failing to produce the amount which would be derived from a well-administered income-tax, and only tolerated because the taxpayers subject to it are well aware that almost any change in the law is likely to add to the amount of their taxation. The original income-tax was abolished when it had begun to work, quite smoothly, in Lower Bengal, and the chief defects of the law had been eradicated and cured. Its ghost, the license-tax, now reigns in its stead, and people who pay the license-tax receive a license to do nothing, or, in some cases, to carry on the business for which they have to pay another license-tax under the local municipal laws.