difference, in the different countries of the Archi*
pelago. The relative situation of the sovereign
and cultivator may justly be compared to that of
a Russian or Polish lord with his peasants. The
European noble estimates the value of his estate,
not by the number or fertility of its acres, but by
the amount of his peasants. This is exactly what
is done in Java. The sovereign, in his letters of
nobility, does not say that he gives a certain number
of acres, or a certain quantity of land, but that
he gives a certain number of cultivators, or, which
is the same thing, the labour of a certain number
of cultivators. The subject of landed tenures in
oriental countries has been, for the first time, admirably
explained by the philosophical author of
that invaluable and great work, The History of
British India, when he states, that, “ In a country
in which the revenue of the sovereign was increased
in proportion to the number of cultivators, there
would be a competition, not of cultivators for the
land, but of the land for cultivators.” That “ If
a ryot cultivated a piece of ground, and paid his assessment
punctually to the sovereign, the sovereign
would be far from any wish to remove him
when it was difficult to supply his place;” and
that, “ If he sold the ground to another ryot,
or left it to a successor, that is, put another in
his place who would fulfil the wishes of the sovereign,
the sovereign, whose source of fear was
the want of a cultivator, had still cause, for satisfaction
; and seldom if ever interfered.” * This
principle is, if possible, still more applicable to the
Indian islands than to any part of Hindustan; for
the competition of the land for cultivators is still more
pressing. There is not a country of the whole Archipelago,
the fifth part of which is occupied, and
of many the hundredth part is not in a state of culture.
It will constantly be found, that, in the
agricultural countries which are best peopled, the
cultivator is invested with the smallest power over
the land, and, on the contrary, that he possesses
the greatest power over it in the countries worst
peopled, or where the competition for cultivators
is greatest. In Celebes, in Bali, and in that ill-peopled
portion of Java called the country of the Sun-
das, the cultivator is invested with a kind of proprietary
right. By sufferance he can bequeath, alienate,
or mortgage his little tenement. In the highly
peopled provinces of Java, where the population be*
Mill’s History of British India.—The enlightened Fifth
Report of the House of Commons on Indian Affairs, and Mr
Mill’s book, both written by gentlemen who never visited
India, and the better for being so, will constitute a new era
in the history of our Indian legislation, and are, at once, a
proud evidence of the diffusion of knowledge among us, and
a satisfactory refutation of the pernicious prejudice that an
Indian residence is indispensable to an understanding of Indian
affairs.