An immemorial custom in India, consolidated in the Laws of Manu, gave the ruler a share in all crops—a fraction fluctuating according to the soil, but not higher than one quarter. Probably this was a tribute levied upon the village community in return for protection, or simply as a penalty for conquest. It was paid in kind, so much grain from so much crop, and as the proportion was always the same on the same ground, the peasant did not feel the variation in quantity much. But having inherited the custom, the British rulers found it more convenient and uniform to collect the tax in cash, and to levy the rate, not in proportion to each year’s crop, but on a valuation that remains unaltered for long terms of years—usually thirty years in Madras and Bombay, but twenty years in other places, for instance in the Punjab. This process of valuation is called the Settlement, and Settlement Officers are almost continually engaged in drawing up a kind of progressive Doomsday Book upon the fields, pastures, woods, and wells of each village. It is hardly possible to ascertain the exact proportion of value fixed by the Settlement Officers as the tax. Throughout India there is a general understanding that “about one-half of the well-ascertained net assets should be the Government demand.”[21] This income tax of ten shillings in the pound is, however, in reality a fairly steady minimum, and the tax often goes higher, to say nothing of the “cesses” or local taxes nominally levied for roads and education. Whether the money is called tax or rent, would not seem at first sight to make much difference; for it has to be paid and the people who pay it have no voice in its levy or in its expenditure. If it is a tax, it is a large income tax on land, fixed for some years and collected from the smallest landowners as well as the largest. If it is a rent, the system is partial land-nationalization without national control and without economic freedom. But as a matter of practice, the difference in the use of words is vital, and it cannot be put more plainly than in the Minute written by Lord Salisbury when he was Secretary of State for India in 1875:— “If we say that it is rent, the modern Indian statesman will hold the Government in strictness entitled to all that remains after wages and profits have been paid, and he will do what he can to hasten the advent of the day when the State shall no longer be kept by any weak compromises from the enjoyment of its undoubted rights. If we persuade him that it is revenue, he will note the vast disproportion of its incidence compared to that of other taxes, and his efforts will tend to remedy the inequality, and to lay upon other classes and interests a more equitable share of the fiscal burden. I prefer the latter tendency to the former.”[22]