We may assume the Settlement Officer to be a scrupulously honest and painstaking public servant. Let us assume that his knowledge of agriculture and local conditions is equal to his devotion. Still his responsibility is almost too great for the wisest and most zealous official. It is his official duty to raise as much as he decently can for the Government, whether he calls the sum tax or rent or share of profits. Against his decision there can be no resistance and no practicable appeal. The cultivator is not in reality a free agent in the new bargain, and if he protests that the payment is beyond his income, he is informed that, being incapable of cultivating his own land to the highest advantage, he must learn better or go. Usually he does neither. In most cases he has no opportunity for learning better, and he cannot, or does not, go. He borrows. An anonymous writer once attacked me with scorn for saying that a large proportion of cultivators in Bombay were receiving no net income, no profits for themselves at all; they were simply existing on their land, and for their few clothes, medicines, and family festivals they were trying to get outside work, selling their family bangles, or appealing to the money-lender on the off-chance that a “bumper crop” might enable them to pay something some day. “According to Mr. Nevinson,” cried this anonymous writer, “the ryots in the Presidency are such simpletons as to go on cultivating land, their income from such cultivation being always equalled by their cultivation expenses. Why, then, do they cultivate at all, when obviously by abandoning the land and its profitless cultivation they could at once better their position by devoting to other work the time and labour they now expend on cultivation.”[25] The question is worthy of the old professorial economists, who never went beyond books for knowledge, and settled the affairs of human nature in their studies by their own conceptions of reason. They used to tell us that, when one trade failed, the labour devoted to it became absorbed in other occupations. I have often wondered, if their trade of theorizing failed, in what other occupation their labour would become absorbed. A large number of our Indian officials spend nearly the whole of their time dealing with abstractions and cases on paper, their feet under their writing-tables. The increasing pressure of the daily routine drives them further and further from reality, and one might suppose that this anonymous writer had never been face to face with a peasant in his home, or known anything of the peasant’s clinging to the land, or ever been thrown out of work and compelled to face starvation for a single day himself.