step in the new departure will be taken by the much abused village soukar, or banker. The ryat r the pet lamb fatted up for the revenue commissioner’s knife, is protected by the paternal Govern- ment against all others having a claim on his fleece . 1 The Govern-
ages, when the property in the soil became engrossed by a few, and their over- grown estates were worked by slaves, Rome was forced to depend on other countries, both for food and to recruit her armies.— * 4 Modum agri m primis servandum antiqui putavere. Quippe ita censebant, satius esse minus serere, ct melius arare. Qua in sententia et Virgilium fuisse video. Verumque con- fute ntibus latifundia perdidere Italiam : jam vero et provincial Sex domini semissem African possidebant, cum interfecit eos Nero prince ps.” — Lib. xviii cap. vL The whole of the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters of this book are of remarkable interest to readers of Indian experience. Compare also Thirl waifs Greece , ii 34 ; Diodorus, i 79 and Plutarch’s .Solon and Cmsar. Greece and Italy wonderfully explain India, while a knowledge of India enables us to quicken the pages of Greek and Roman history with vivid life. At every turn in the Maratha country, in the Till ty mawnls, the wayfarer comes on the bed of some mountain stream tufted all along its banks, and all over the little green cyots lying amid its waste of pebbles, with mixed tamarisk and sweet-scented oleander* which carry the beholder back at once to the Ilissus and wooded slopes of Mount HymettUS. The lovely blushing oleanders are alwa) r s found to shade some pure clear pool left by the river in its summer flood, at which the gentle maidens and comely matrons of the neighbouring' village are filling their water jars, forming
- l . . .a group that’s quite antique.
Draped lightly, loving, natural, and Greek w ; as in the painting, on the Rogers Vase, of the women of Athens filling their pitchers at the fair flowing fountains of Callirrhoe. 1 The outcry against the village usurer is as ancient as the settlement of the land in the East. The fifth chapter of Nehemiah might be read as an extract from the Report of the Deccan Ryots Commission j and Nehemiah, in his paternal interposition between the Jewish cultivators and the Jewish usurers, is seen to have been actuated by exactly the same spirit as an Indian Civilian. Turning to the usurers, he addressed them : “It is not good that ye do, ... 1 likewise, and my brethren, and my servants [the Revenue Commissioner and Collectors and their Assistants], might exact of them [the ryots] money and corn - I pray you, let us leave off this usury. Restore, I pray you, to them, even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their olive-yards, and their houses, also the hundredth part of the money, and of the corn, the wine, and the oil, that ye exact of them. Then said they, We will restore them, and will require nothing of them ; so will we do as thou gayest. Then I called the priests, and took an oath of them, that they should do according to this promise. Also I shook iay lap,
