India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey.

  • John Strachey
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    448/552 page 418
    f T 418 INDIA CHAP. r wealth increased, as cultivators were more readily found, and custom began to give way to competition, the position of the ryots became worse and that of the zem- indars became stronger. Other circumstances helped the process of confiscation of the rights of the peasantry. For more than half a century after the Permanent Settlement was made, the Executive Government in Bengal was extremely weak. The English principle that in the ordinary affairs of life the less the State interferes with individual action the better, and that for the protection of private rights little more is required than the maintenance of order, with good courts of justice accessible to all, is admirable when applied to the government of Englishmen, but it is unsuitable to India, and there could be no people to which it was less applicable than the people of Bengal. This prin- ciple of non-interference was carried out in that province to an extent unknown in any other part of India. Nothing would have so much helped the timid people of Bengal in social and political progress as the just and active and masterful administration of Englishmen, resolute that the rights of the weak should be respected, determined to satisfy themselves by personal knowledge that this was done, and possessing power to interfere effectively on behalf of those who could not protect themselves. A system of administration which left it to the courts of justice to remedy any oppression of which the sufferer might complain, or which he might be able to prove, practically resulted in providing no remedy at all. I showed in a former chapter1 that in other provinces of India an elaborate machinery has been spread over the whole country, extending its ramifications into every
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