But many parts of India, when they first came under British sovereignty, had suffered from the passage of armies, from marauding bands, from the dispersion or impoverishment of the cultivators, and from all the calamities of war. In the violent contests for possession of territory and revenue the lands had been forcibly seized, and the strife had been incessant between the old and the new proprietors. In the outlying districts, during intervals of confusion, neither rent nor revenue could be regularly levied, as an intermittent struggle between those who strove to exact too much and those who would pay nothing at all was maintained among tenants, landlords, and official tax-gatherers. In this manner, by the swaying to and fro of the conflict, by local accidents, and by the vicissitudes of political power, was produced that intricate variety of proprietary and cultivating tenures, with an arbitrary and fluctuating assessment of revenue, which the English found in the different provinces that fell at different times under their administration.
The precarious nature of proprietary and occupancy rights, bearing traces of ruinous exaction or lawless resistance, left room for every kind of theory as to the basis upon which the relations between landlord and tenant, and between both classes and the state, should be permanently or temporarily determined. What meaning and what measure of legal recognition should be assigned to local usage and prescriptive claims, how far the law ought to interfere to modify the stringency of contracts imposed upon the tenantry, whether the
