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preparing to despoil the zemindars of Orissa as they despoiled those of Bengal, by means of the Tenancy Act which a compliant and obedient Legislative Council passed in 1885. The provisions of that enactment created a class of middlemen delusively named "Occupancy ryots," who were endowed with the right of holding their lands at a permanently fixed rent, while they were authorised to rack rent their under-tenants, the cultivators. No surer scheme could have been devised for enabling these middlemen to secure the bulk of the profits from agriculture, which legitimately belong to the owners and cultivators of the land.

The aim of that complicated scheme will be more easily apprehended on a review of the course which the Authorities previously pursued in respect of the Permanent Settlement. When that compact enabled the zemindars, by the application of capital and labour, to develop the resources of their estates, to discharge the heavy tax permanently imposed on them, and later, to increase their incomes and the well-being of their tenants, the Government pledge to refrain from enhancing the land tax was represented by zealous fiscal officers as a wanton sacrifice of revenue. The suggestion to repudiate Lord Cornwallis's Permanent Settlement was entertained on the ground that it did not bind the present generation, and when that question came before the Secretary of State's Council in London, a member emphatically declared:"We have no standing ground in India except brute force, if we forfeit our character for truth." At the same time many high Indian officials raised their voices against repudiation, with the result that open repudiation was abandoned and the scheme of the Tenancy Act, which offered the same financial advantage, while its violation of principle was obscured in its complicated machinery, was, after a few years of ingenious elaboration, duly enacted in

1885. A non-official member of the Legislature said on the occasion :

"I yield to no one in my desire to see the ryots protected from oppression; but it is my deliberate opinion that this Bill will not accomplish that object. On the contrary, I believe that the constant intervention of Revenue officers in the details of agricultural life will lead to the most widespread confusion, and will be as disastrous to the ryots as to the zemindars themselves. I view with the deepest concern the outlook before us. We are embarking rashly on a sea of change, and many will be shipwrecked on the voyage. Whatever be the result, I have at any rate the satisfaction of feeling that I have acted as the true friend of my country and the Government in warning you of the political dangers which, I believe, underlie the proposed legislation."

Some two years before the measure was enacted, and while it was still under elaboration, a draft of its provisions with official notes was submitted for the opinion of the Chief Justice of Bengal, who indited an instructive Minute on the subject, containing the following statements :

"I consider the last argument* quite superfluous. I take it to be clear that any Government, in case of real emergency, has a right, so far as it is necessary, to interfere with vested rights, to whomsoever they may belong and howsoever they may have been created. But then I take it to be equally clear that, without some such actual necessity, no Government is justified in interfering with the vested interests of any class of its subjects, especially when those interests have been created and defined after due consideration by the State's own legislative enactments. The true question is, whether there does or does not exist any such necessity as justifies the Government in depriving the landlords of their rights and privileges in the manner proposed in the Bill. I see no such necessity, and I am bound to say that, amongst the many complaints on behalf of the ryots, which have been published by the Government in connection with this subject, I am unable to find a single statement that the ryots themselves desired anything of the kind. The deprivation to which I allude was never even suggested by the

* That Government had reserved in the Permanent Settlement the power of interference.

ryots. It was proposed for the first time by certain officials, and is supported, not upon the ground of actual necessity, but because in the opinion of those gentlemen the ryots were, or ought to have been, in a better position some ninety years ago than they are now, and that it is desirable in the interests of the State to place them in that position.

I view with horror and dismay the provisions of the present Bill. It appears to me absolutely cruel to sacrifice wantonly and unnecessarily the rights of one section of the community for the supposed benefit of another; to violate laws and usages which have been sanctioned by the Courts and the Legislature for nearly a century, to unrip a solemn settlement of vexed questions made twenty-three years ago, and all this, not for the purpose of meeting any actual complaints or rectifying any proved abuses, but merely to place the ryots in a position which certain, I think, mistaken officials imagined they occupied in 1793. I must add that the ground (if it is worthy of being called by that name) upon which the authors of the Bill pretend to justify their interference with the rights of the zemindars, appears to me as transparent a pretext as ever was presented to the public.

"I think that the Bengal public has a right to inquire upon what authority those views are founded, and how far they are consistent with the opinions of the many distinguished men who, as judges, statesmen, and legislators, have administered and explained the law during the last ninety years. And in answer to this inquiry the Public may be surprised to learn that, as to some of the proposed changes, they are based upon no authority at all; as to others, that the views of these gentlemen are founded upon their own construction of the Regulations of 1793 and the Act of 1859-entirely without regard to the construction which has been put upon those enactments by the Courts of Law and the Legislature; and as to all, that their views are not only inconsistent with the opinions and the policy of the last three generations, but with the laws and usages which have prevailed in Bengal since the time of the Permanent Settlement.

"I have always been under the impression that the proper construction of a legislative enactment is, in this as in most other countries, a matter prima facie to be determined by the Courts of Law, and if the Courts of Law give a meaning to it, which the Legislature or the Government did not intend, it is

then the duty of the Government, with the assistance of the Legislature, to set them right by passing some amending measure. But when we find that the construction which the Law Courts put upon the Permanent Settlement was approved by the Legislature and the Government, it looks very much as if that construction was the one which the Government had originally intended. And, moreover, when the Legislature in the year 1859 accepted their interpretation of the law and framed the Act of that year in accordance with it, it seems to me that the weight of authority in favour of that interpretation is almost overwhelming, and the more so when we remember that in the year 1869, after the Government on the one hand, and the agricultural community on the other, had made trial for ten years of the working of the Act of 1859, another Act was passed which, instead of altering that law, confirmed it in all material respects.

"By the Acts of 1859 and 1869, the relations of landlord and tenant had been settled by the Government, and upon the faith of that settlement many thousands estates had been purchased by the zemindars and many lakhs of rupees expended upon those estates. These gentlemen were therefore surely justified in opposing any invasion of their rights as settled and confirmed by those Acts; and the onus would seem to lie upon those who would counsel such invasion, to shew that it was necessary and justifiable."

The Minute further exposes the unprincipled character of several other provisions of the Bill; and, after shewing that, whilst its avowed object was to benefit the cultivators, it effectually deprived them of the protection they were receiving under existing laws, from being subjected to rack rents, the document closes with the following words :"I hope and pray that the policy of confiscation-which has borne and is bearing still such terrible fruit in Ireland— may be averted, by the blessing of God, from our Indian possessions."

During the years which have elapsed since that hope and that prayer were uttered, the Indian populations, subjected to the policy of confiscation involved in the Bengal Tenancy Act and to the system of arbitrary re-assessments

of the land tax, have been stripped of much of their substance and resources, chiefly for defraying unprovoked and unsuccessful wars carried on beyond the boundaries of their country; and now they are overtaken by a famine of unprecedented extent, the attacks of which the masses, in their impoverished condition, are helpless to resist.

J. DACOSTA.

IN

III.-PROCEDURE IN POETRY.

N an article in the February number of the Law Magazine and Review the present writer expressed his intention of attempting to elaborate in greater detail the subject which was then only hinted at in a note. The subject is an extensive one, and to be completely treated needs a knowledge of European literature greater than is at the disposal of most members of the Bar. For the present article, researches have been made in the literatures, ancient and modern, of the most important European languages. As might perhaps have been expected, there is little or nothing bearing on the question to be found in the literature of countries in which Chivalry and Roman law had little influence, and the Anglo-Saxon, modern Greek, Scandinavian, and Russian literatures have been drawn blank. Where instances do occur, the main difficulty has been to determine what to accept and what to reject amid so rich a mass of material. Anything dramatic has been excluded. The numerous "trial scenes which occur in Shakespeare and in dramas like Les Plaideurs and the Nise Lastimosa of Bermudez are not dealt with. Excluded also are (1) records in verse of actual trials such as the "State Trials in Verse,"

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By N. T. Moile (1842), more curious than interesting. The verse is of the flattest and most conventional type.

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