Further, although excessive alienation of land through money-lenders may be very bad, yet stagnation in ownership may be worse. India and Burma are progressive, and changes must take place. Cultivators will become artisans and traders; city people will like to return to the land. There is an ebb and flow which is good for all. Too great rigidity of system will stop progress. A good system of land tenure is that which is in accordance with the evolution of the people it applies to and assists in that evolution. While recognising that for the bulk of the people small holdings are best, it will not forbid larger estates; while admitting that the alienation of land through borrowing recklessly from money-lenders is bad, it will see that the progress of the people from purely agricultural towards a state of industrial activity is not checked. It takes all sorts to make a State. It may be good for the cultivator to hold direct from Government, but if Government is to be the landlord it must act up to its name. It must give compensation for improvements when a tenant has to relinquish the land. Otherwise no tenant will improve, and the necessity for improvement, for wells, irrigation, embankments, manuring, and so on, is the greatest necessity of agriculture. In my own experience I have seen that the system of State land tenure in Upper Burma does stop improvements. That is the light in which the land question has to be worked out, on broad comprehensive lines--that, while acknowledging the present, sees also the future, which, while seeing one form of good does not deny another. So, with an understanding and a sympathetic _personnel_, the administration would be brought nearer to the people, until at length when their capacity for self-government had developed they would be able to take over our administrative machine little by little and work it themselves. They could never do that now. If by any chance they did get possession of the machinery at present, they would set to work to smash it till none remained. CHAPTER XVII SELF-GOVERNMENT And thus the sheltering Government of India having been reformed both in its _personnel_ and in its laws, brought into touch and sympathy with its people, a start would be made with self-government. That, of course, must begin with the village, which is the germ from which all self-government that is of any value has always begun, and on the health and vitality of which it must always depend. The village organism must be restored to the state in which we found it, and from that be helped and encouraged to grow to greater things. The whole of the present conception of the village as an appanage of the headman, and the conception of the headman as an official of Government, must be swept away and a new and true conception must be arrived at.