3_s._, and now have risen in the present year to 66_l._, deserves most serious consideration. There is only one other statement of Mr. Hyndman which I desire to notice. He declares the general opinion of the natives to be that life, as a whole, has become harder since the English took the country, and he adds his own opinion that the fact is so. Mr. Hyndman, as we have seen, knows but little of the actual life of the agricultural population, and of their state under native rule he probably knows less. But I am inclined to think he fairly represents a very prevailing belief amongst the natives. A vivid indication of this native feeling is given in the most instructive work on Hindu rural life that I have ever met with.[14] Colonel Sleeman thus recounts a conversation he held with some natives in one of his rambles-- I got an old landowner from one of the villages to walk on with me a mile and put me in the right road. I asked him what had been the state of the country under the former government of the Jats and Mahrattas, and was told that the greater part was a wild jungle. "I remember," said the old man, "when you could not have got out of the road hereabouts without a good deal of risk. I could not have ventured a hundred yards from the village without the chance of having my clothes stripped off my back. Now the whole country is under cultivation, and the roads are safe. Formerly the governments kept no faith with their landowners and cultivators, exacting ten rupees where they had bargained for five whenever they found their crops good. But in spite of all this _zulm_ (oppression) there was then more _burkul_ (blessings from above) than now; the lands yielded more to the cultivator." Colonel Sleeman on the same day asked a respectable farmer what he thought of the latter statement. He stated: "The diminished fertility is owing, no doubt, to the want of those salutary fallows which the fields got under former governments, when invasions and civil wars were things of common occurrence, and kept at least _two-thirds of the land waste_."