LANDED PROPERTY IN ASIA. 103 are armed. The cultivator is by some persons considered to be, throughout this large portion of the globe, the legal owner of his plot of land. And indeed he has some of the supposed characteristics of ownership, since he is empowered, in general, to mortgage, sell, or alienate it, and that it descends at his decease, if not otherwise disposed of, in equal portions to his heirs. There is, however, an almost infinite variety in the local customs which determine this tenure; every petty province having some minute peculiarity. And it is even yet a matter of dispute among writers who have deeply studied the institutions of our Indian empire, which of the three parties who have everywhere a joint interest in the land, the peasant-cultivator (or ryot), the tax-collector (or zemindar), and the sovereign, is its real legitimate proprietor. In practice, each has a lien upon its produce, and to that extent each may be reckoned its owner. The tax-collector, like the ryot, has an hereditary and transferable interest in his post, which brings him a revenue in a per centage of the sum he collects from the ryots for the sovereign. The question would perhaps have offered fewer difficulties, had due attention been paid to the simple principles on which land is originally appropriated from a state of waste, by the industry of the labourer, and subsequently when it has become, through his agency, a valuable possession, seized on as their property by any party sufficiently powerful to support such a claim. The ancient institutions of the Hindoos, which have scarcely varied during four thousand years, strongly illustrate and confirm what we have already urged on this point. 6 The Institutes of Menu, a work of immense antiquity, expressly declare that cultivated land is the property of him who cut away the wood, or who cleared and tilled it.' And indeed if this rule did not follow from the most obvious principles of natural justice, its policy, as encouraging the improvement and cultivation of waste land in a new and little occupied country, would lead to its enactment even under the most unnatural and barbarous tyranny.* But every society must have a government of some sort for its protection from domestic anarchy and external attack; and a government necessitates a general contribution or taxation for its support, which in an early and agricultural state can only be raised off the land. Hence a certain proportion of the produce of the soil has been almost everywhere required for this purpose from its cultivators. In ancient Egypt, one-fifth of the crops was so taken. Among the Jews, a tenth; and in the Grecian likewise and Roman states a similar proportion was the contri * In Persia, where, from the peculiar nature of the soil, a very expensive system of artificial irrigation by means of wells is absolutely necessary for the production of crops, the ancient and inalterable law confers on the person who so digs such wells the perpetual ownership of the land fertilized by him, (with the sole reservation of the quit-rent or tax of one-fifth of the produce to the Shah;) and so necessary is the inviolability of this rule felt to be, for securing a due supply of food in the country, that throughout the scenes of anarchy, rapine, and licentiousness of which Persia has been so often the theatre, property of this character has been invariably respected. In the same manner, as we find from the Holy Scriptures, in the very earliest ages a well in the desert was held to be the property of him who dug it, and of his descendants for ever. LANDED PROPERTY IN ASIA. 105 bution generally required for the use of the state. In Persia, a fifth; in Hindostan, from one-eighth to one-seventeenth appears to have been levied in the earliest ages, In the Institutes of Menu the sovereign is expressly permitted to double this tax, raising it to one-fourth, during war. Such was the tax paid to Porus when Alexander invaded him. Whether this latter regulation acted among sovereigns as a premium on war, or not, it is but too notorious that the Eastern world has very rarely enjoyed the blessings of peace. And in the convulsed and desolating state which almost perpetual warfare induces, amid alternating invasions, revolts, conspiracies, and conquests, it may be easily imagined how, through all these phases, the poor cultivator, whom, after all, the rival factions were but contending for the power of plundering, was ground to the earth by continued exactions, and could profit little by the barren honour, even if it were conceded to him, of a nominal ownership in the soil. Its produce, when cultivated by his toil, was sure to be claimed by some party or other, the temporary sovereign, or his subordinate chieftains. The ryot might esteem himself fortunate who was allowed to preserve his life and a bare sufficiency for its maintenance, as the requital of his toil. The question, therefore, as to whether the Asiatic ryot, the zemindar, or the sovereign, is the legal owner of the soil, seems to us susceptible of a very simple solution. Throughout the East, the will of the sovereign has always been law-so that to hold, land by that will was to hold it by law. It is only.. when law acquires a power above that of the so vereign that private property in its true sense can be said to exist. We must not ask then, with regard to Asia, what is the law, but what is the custom and the fact; and the answer is, that the necessity of affording to the peasant-cultivator some guarantee for his continued occupation of the soil he ploughs and sows, in order to induce him to plough and sow it, has compelled the Asiatic despots to allow him a partial and limited proprie torship; that is to say, they have permitted him and his descendants to occupy and cultivate his spot of ground on condition of paying whatever proportion of its produce the sovereign chooses directly, or through his officers, to exact. And he has seldom, or never, been content to take less than could by threat, torture, or violence, be squeezed from the miserable cultivator, leaving him a most inadequate subsistence. The cultivator is, then, in law, custom, and fact, the slave of his sovereign,* and his property is wholly at the command of the latter. If, therefore, as seems presumable, the owner of land can only be defined as one who has the right of profiting by whatever circumstances may improve the value of his land; the ryot has been always considered, in theory, the landowner, never in practice. He was continually promised this right by sovereigns or their collectors, who wished to tempt him to improve his land; but who, so soon as it was improved, raised * He is punishable with stripes if he neglect to cultivate duly his land-his pretended property. He is, therefore, not even master of his own limbs and actions, but essentially a slave. TENURE OF LAND IN ASIA. 107 their demands on him in proportion, so as to leave him none of the benefit. The Asiatic system is evidently a compromise between the usurped and unlimited power of the despot, and the ancient and natural privilege of private property as the result of appropriation by private labour;-a concession extorted from the chief by the necessity of persuading his people to exercise their industry, lest he should prove, like Sultan Mahmoud, in the Arabian Nights, a ruler only over owls and ruins, barren plains and dead carcasses. Even under our comparatively mild and peaceful sway it is to be feared that the peasant-cultivators of our Eastern empire have suffered severely from the weight of direct taxation imposed upon them, and the exactions of the intermediate parties who are intrusted with the collection of the revenue from the poor ryot. There is nothing necessarily mischievous in the theory of the Eastern forms of land occupation. On the contrary, it approximates to that which we consider the most natural, equitable, and beneficial arrangement, namely, the securing a permanent property in the land to him who renders it productive, and to his heirs, subject only to a payment to the state proportioned to the value of the produce, for the purpose of defraying the expenses necessary for the protection of this and other property. The misery suffered by the land-cultivators of Asia and the wretched state of their agriculture are a consequence not of the original rule of the country, but of its continual infraction. It is their exposure to the desolating violence of almost per |