of peace and order in that vast empire, is not less efficient. As regards the civil law, we have perhaps been scarcely so successful, mainly because a large part of the substantive civil law, covered by Mohammedan law which is impossible to codify, and by Hindu law of which there is no single body, cannot be touched by our legislators.
Of this same third phase there is still another aspect, and the last. Before our coming, public finance did not exist, or, so far as it did, was mere oppression and iniquity. To be candid, our own record was only moderate up to the Mutiny, and that rising, which entailed a large debt, added confusion to chaos. Public finance, on modern lines, dates in India from 1860.
During the fifty years since that date, our people have done wonders in finance. Hardly any important country nowadays, east or west, is well managed financially, except India. But India can easily be shown to be admirably administered in this department. For instance, she has reduced her non-productive debt so fast during this century that at the same rate of extinction it will be nil in eighteen years' time. Or again, to compare to-day with 1860, the land revenue is everywhere lighter; customs duties have been greatly reduced; the salt tax, the only obligatory imposition falling on the general mass of the people, has been cut down enormously. To have set up a modern government on such economic lines is without parallel.
And this has been effected by a covenanted
