Of the assessment and of famine I had heard and read a great deal before, but one set of grievances, closely connected with both, was new to me. It arose from the Forest Laws—a subject we hardly consider in England unless we are thinking of William Rufus or the game-preserves of kilted City Fathers in the Highlands. The present strict system of forest preservation was, I believe, instituted after the terrible famine of 1877-78, with the admirable intention of restoring the rainfall. In old times the village communities maintained a tract of communal forest for grazing and fuel near each village, just as they did formerly in England, and still do in Russia. An ancient Indian custom set aside an acre of grazing for every acre of cultivated land. But under our rule the influence of village communities was to a great extent destroyed, because we remembered nothing like it in England, and the plough was suffered to encroach upon the forest till there was a real danger that no forest would be left and the rains would cease. Nothing could be better than the intention of the Forest Department in checking the process called “denudation,” but instead of restoring the control of forests to the villagers themselves under definite rules of maintenance, they centralized the managements as bureaucrats will, declared uncultivated land to be Government forest, prohibited wood-gathering or cattle-grazing without payment, let out the grass and timber by auction to contractors, and entered the proceeds to the advantage of the Department. There is no denying the benefits to Government and the contractors. The destruction of forest is checked, hay and fuel are supplied to the cavalry cantonments and cities, and the Department (including Burma) contributes a net sum of about £800,000 a year to the Indian exchequer.[29] Could anything be more desirable? [Illustration: ON THE CAUSEWAY.] [Illustration: A VILLAGE HEADMAN.] “But how about my buffalo?” cries the thin ryot of the valley. As Mr. Vaughan Nash said in his book on the Famine, the buffalo is quite as necessary to the Indian peasant as a boat to a fisherman. Buffaloes are necessary for work on the fields, manure for the soil, and milk for the family, to say nothing of fuel and flooring. No one who, like myself, has lived much in Kaffir huts with cow-dung floors, or has cooked on the veldt for weeks together with cow-dung as fuel, will make light of such uses. But still, when wood is to be had, only a fool uses cow-dung for cooking or even for flooring. In the Indian forests, wood is to be had, but the Forest Laws forbid the people to use it, and they are driven to floor and cook with the cow-dung that ought rightly to go as manure for the fields.