NOTE C, p. 49.
ON VIL1AGE ESTATES.
As Colonel Sleeman's ' Rambles of an Indian Official ' are not easily accessible, I give some more extracts from them bearing on village communities as he knew them. In the tenth chapter of the first volume he writes :
'Nine-tenths of the immediate cultivators of the soil in India are little farmers, who hold a lease for one or more years, as the case may be, of their lands, which they cultivate with their own stock. One of these cultivators, with a gocd plough and bullocks, and a good character, can always get good lands on moderate terms from holders of villages. Those cultivators are, I think, the best who learn to depend upon their stock and character for favourable terms, hold themselves free to change their holdings when their leases expire, and pretend not to any hereditary right of property in the soil. The lands are, I think, best cultivated, and the society best constituted in India, when the holders of Estates of Villages have a feeling of permanent interest in them, an assurance of an hereditary right of property which is liable only to the payment of a moderate government demand, descends undivided by the law of primogeniture, and is unaffected by the common law, which prescribes the equal subdivision among children of landed as well as other private property among the Hindus and Mohammedans, and where the immediate cultivators hold the lands they till by no other law than of common specific contract.
'When I speak of villages, I mean the holders of lands that belong to villages. The whole face of India is parcelled
