2. Can we get behind the period of Mogul rule, and discover whether it was super-imposed directly on a number of free cultivating groups, or whether it swept away a class of landlords? Such an opportunity seems to be presented by the institutions of Rajputana, which are described by Sir Alfred Lyall as “the only ancient political institutions now surviving upon any considerable scale in India,” and as having suffered little essential change between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries (_Asiatic Studies_, pp. 185, 193). “In the Western Rajput States the conquering clans are still very much in the position which they took up on first entry upon the lands. They have not driven out, slain, or absolutely enslaved the anterior occupants, or divided off the soil among groups of their own cultivating families.... Their system of settlement was rather that of the Gothic tribes after their invasion of the Danubian provinces of the Roman empire, who, according to Finlay, ‘never formed the bulk of the population in the lands which they occupied, but were only lords of the soil, principally occupied in war and hunting.’ In a Rajput State of the best preserved original type, we still find all the territory ... partitioned out among the Rajputs, in whose hands is the whole political and military organisation.... Under the Rajputs are the cultivating classes ... who now pay land rent to the lords or their families, living in village communities with very few rights and privileges, and being too often no more than rack-rented peasantry” (_Ibid._, p. 197). Here, it is true, we have a case of conquest by an invading race; but if this be compared with the description given by Sir William Hunter of the constitution of Orissa under its native princes, before the period of Mahometan rule, it will be seen that the condition of the cultivators was much the same, whoever might be their masters. Orissa would seem to have been divided into two parts, the royal domain “treated as a private estate and vigilantly administered by means of land-bailiffs,” and the estates of the “feudal nobility,” known as Fort-holders (_Orissa_, pp. 214-219). In the petty Tributary States in the neighbourhood of British Orissa, there are said to be now no intermediary holders between the husbandman and the Rajah, “in whom rests the abstract ownership, while the right of occupancy remains with the actual cultivator.” The condition of things reproduces, therefore, on a small scale and subject to British control, what was to be found on an immensely larger scale under the Mogul emperors. Whether there ever were in these districts lords of land between the prince and the peasant is not clear.