from its working during the past five years, it has been accepted on both sides as a fair adjustment of the grievances it was intended to remove.

A second measure of the same kind was passed later in Lord Dufferin's viceroyalty. In 1882 Lord Ripon's Government, acting upon disclosures made in a particular case, had directed an inquiry to be made into the condition of the tenants in Oudh; and upon the report thereafter submitted a scheme for protecting tenants from incessant eviction had been proposed to the Secretary of State. But as these proposals were not accepted, and were even generally discouraged, it remained for Lord Dufferin to decide whether they should be again pressed, after revision, upon the India Office, or whether the whole scheme should be dropped. Lord Dufferin, after taking counsel with the local authorities, resolved that, for the purpose of protecting the tenant and improving his security, the law must be amended. Here, again, Lord Dufferin's experience, as a landlord and as a legislator, of similar difficulties and their remedies invested him with great influence in bringing the whole matter to an amicable conclusion. As the Bengal zemindars had appealed to the permanent settlement of 1798, so the Oudh talukhdars were disposed to find their magna charta in a declaration made in 1866 that the Oudh tenant could prove no right of prescriptive occupancy. Whether he must, therefore, be left exposed in perpetuity to arbitrary ejectment and unlimited rack-renting was the point at issue; but to attempt a recapitulation of the controversy would be now out of place. Everyone is agreed that rents must vary with the circumstances of a country, and no one maintained that in Oudh the ordinary tenant had any proprietary right in his holding. But the landlords claimed illimitable power to eject or enhance, while by law the cultivating tenure held good for twelve months only a state of things that led to depression of the cultivating classes and was undeniably adverse to good farming. Many years before this time Lord Dufferin, in his speeches on the Irish land question, had pointed out that when large estates are plotted out to small farms the farmers must make the improvements; and he had insisted on the necessity of giving them security and a period of lease adequate for profiting by the investment of their money. The situation was very much the same in Oudh the evils to be cured were great insecurity of holdings and incessant competition among cottiers for the land; and the remedy applied was to prescribe a statutory period of

tenure and to place a check upon indiscriminate enhancement of rents. The steady support given by Lord Dufferin to these moderate amendments of the law so far overcame the natural opposition of the talukhdars that the Oudh Rent Act was finally passed with their acquiescence. That such a compact and influential association of landowners of the old Indian type, headed by some of the largest proprietors in Upper India, should have been thus reconciled to a measure which, however necessary, was adverse to their immediate interests, must be counted as a notable exploit of administrative diplomacy. And there is no doubt that if, as may be expected, the new law improves the condition of the tenants, and encourages their industry by protecting it, the landlords will thereby earn a material reward for the excellent spirit in which as a body they have accepted and are co-operating in this important agrarian reform.

The third and latest Land Tenancy Bill passed by Lord Dufferin's Government relates to the Punjab. The different systems of land tenure established by English law in the three great provinces of Bengal, the North-West, and the Punjab represent mainly, of course, the state of things we found existing in the country. But they also reflect the changes which took place in our own policy as our knowledge of such questions extended with the expansion of our territory, and became more accurate. In Bengal our permanent revenue settlement at the end of the last century left the tenants with rights vaguely recognised but not guarded; in the North-West Provinces we took much trouble, about thirty years later, to protect at least one large class of occupants; in the Punjab, which came last under British rule, the recognition and record of the rights of actual cultivators, proprietary or occupant, formed a chief feature of our land legislation. In the Punjab, as elsewhere in India, the uncertain value of land and the usual dread of the English system of fixed and inexorable demand for revenue made the landlords not unwilling, when they first became our subjects, that the tenants should share their responsibility for revenue payment by obtaining a sort of co-proprietorship in the land. At first everyone preferred the loose haphazard method of native taxgatherers, who sometimes took everything and often got nothing. But as property became secure and prices rose, the question of the proportionate division of the large and steady profits of agriculture became much more important, and naturally engendered a plentiful crop of litigation. Some twenty

years ago an Act had been passed to effect a compromise on the matter; but by 1886 the increasing disputes showed that the law needed amendment, and under Lord Dufferin's Government the task was undertaken by the Punjab authorities. The Punjab is for the most part a country of small landowners and peasant proprietors, and it is with these that the tenants, a very numerous class, have to deal; so that we have these two considerable bodies, of owners and tenants, both directly interested and, for the most part, actually engaged in the cultivation. The problem, therefore, was to distribute and define, as between these two very similar classes, the right of occupation and the profits of agriculture according to well-known usage and sentiment, especially in regard to prescriptive possession by length of tenure and to the reclamation of waste lands. The object of the Bill of 1886 was to carry further this principle by supplementing and enlarging preceding laws; it was passed, after much discussion, in 1887, and here again, as in Oudh, the new measure has been accepted by the country without discontent or friction. We are quite aware that in all these cases the way to final legislation was smoothed and straightened by the address, experience, and ability of the local officers. Nevertheless, in making up the general account of Lord Dufferin's government, we are bound to give it fair credit for the accomplishment of very substantial improvements of the land laws, to the benefit of the cultivating classes, in Bengal, in Oudh, and in the Punjab.

But Lord Dufferin was reminded very early in his viceroyalty that a Governor-General of India is rarely permitted to devote continuous and undivided attention to internal administration. Most of his predecessors have taken up their high office with a fervent desire to preserve peace, to consolidate rather than to augment territorial possessions, and particularly to avoid the distrust and misunderstandings that are bred out of disputes between civilised and semibarbarous states. In these good intentions almost all have failed, the pacific not much less signally than the more enterprising. And those who have carefully studied the history of British India know that neither the Governors-General nor the Indian services are to be held primarily answerable for a system under which we have been incessantly proclaiming peace and prosecuting war, disavowing any wish for territorial extension and steadily enlarging our borders.

So long ago as in 1819 Mr. Canning, speaking on the

vote of thanks to Lord Hastings,* pointed with a true insight to the causes why the English dominion had been spreading so rapidly over the interior of India; and he described a process of expansion that went on for forty years after his speech was made. Of the loose disorderly kingdoms which, starting at the same time with our own power, had been our rivals in the contest for superiority, some became absorbed by cession or conquest, while the rest have been confirmed and established under our suzerainty; until after this manner, and with the full consent of the English nation expressed through its Parliament, our successive Governors-General have pushed by forced marches to the extreme natural boundaries of India. It is just a century since the parliamentary leaders at Westminster were engaged in impeaching the last of the East India Company's Governors-General for unjust and unprovoked wars, and for violent arbitrary dealings with native princes. Yet the impartial student will not fail to observe that the parliamentary Governors-General were dealing, almost before Warren Hastings's trial had ended, in wars, annexations, and high-handed political enterprises generally, upon a scale far beyond anything ever contemplated by the Company's servants. Mr. Spencer Walpole may be right in declaring that every prominent statesman of the time disliked and forbade further additions to the Company's territories; and it is true that in 1784 an Act had been passed forbidding Governors-General to make wars, or treaties leading to wars, except under sanction from home. Nevertheless the fact remains that the era of extensive wars and conquests began when the Crown superseded the Company in supreme executive command; and if the foundations of an Asiatic empire were laid by merchants, its lofty superstructure was run up by the generals and proconsuls of the national government. The period of twenty years, from 1786 to 1805, during which British India was ruled (with short intervals) by the first two parliamentary Governors-General, was also the epoch of our earliest Indian wars on a grand scale, and of our widest annexations; the largest developement of our territory coincides precisely with their tenure of office. We have not far to seek for explanations of this contrast between what English statesmen desired and what they did. A Governor-General in confidential relations with such a

*Speech on the vote of thanks to the Marquis of Hastings, March 4, 1819.

Cabinet as that of William Pitt, and virtually independent of the Directors, had a clear superiority in strength and freedom over his predecessors under the earlier régime, and with a victorious party at his back in England he was irresistible in India. The connexion between our foreign policy in Europe and in Asia became much closer and more sympathetic; a warlike spirit at home spread rapidly abroad; the Indian campaigns of Cornwallis, Wellesley, and Lake were episodes in the great epic of the war between France and England; and the generation which saw almost every throne in Europe upset by Napoleon was not greatly troubled by the dismemberment of Indian principalities whose title deeds were neither older nor better than our own. But let us now overleap fifty years from Warren Hastings's time, and see what was our position, and what was the Governor-General's chief occupation, in the first year of the splendid and memorable reign which has lately celebrated its jubilee. In the north, south, and west of India we have acquired enormous additional territory, and only the Punjab lies in front of us; while beyond the Indus the scenes and personages shift and change rapidly, for the curtain is just rising upon the first incident of the great drama of Central Asian adventures. In 1838 Lord Auckland, backed and encouraged by Lord Melbourne's Cabinet, was just entering upon the line of forward policy that sent English troops for the first time across the Indian frontiers into Afghanistan. The second half-century passes, and now in 1889 her Majesty the Queen-Empress surveys all India united under her sovereignty; the whole of Burmah has been added; the two great high roads into North and South Afghanistan through the Khyber and the Bolan Passes are in English hands; our railways have traversed Biluchistan, and our military outposts are on the Afghan frontier within eighty miles of Kandahar.

With the latest steps that have led up to this commanding position Lord Dufferin's name will always be connected. The treaty of Gandamak concluded by Lord Lytton in 1879 obtained for us permanent cessions of some important territory; the firmness with which Lord Ripon insisted in 1881, against much opposition in India and at home, upon the retention of Pishin and Quetta, has secured for us a strategical frontier of the highest value on the south of Afghanistan; and his support established the present Amir upon the throne to which he had been summoned by the politic foresight of Lord Lytton. For Lord Dufferin, when