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.

    453/552 page 423
    violated, and that the Government had been guilty of a breach of faith. In 1871, and again in 1877, they demanded, on similar grounds, exemption from liability to rates imposed on land and other immovable property for local and provincial roads and public works, for sanitation, education, and other local objects. 'these claims have always been rejected, and the time has passed in which there was danger that any British Government would listen to the pretension that it was the design of the framers of the Permanent Settlement O that no taxation should ever fall upon profits drawn from the land. The intention of that Settlement was simply to fix permanently the share of the produce or rental to which the State, in its capacity of superior landlord, intended to limit its demand. No questions of taxation were touched or involved. In the words of Sir James Stephen, the Permanent Settlement “ reduced to a certainty one particular charge on the land, which had previously been of variable amount, and so freed the landholders from uncertainty which had previously hung over them in respect of it. . . . Since the Per- manent Settlement the proprietary right of the zemindars has been undoubted, and the line between their property and that of the State has been clearly defined, and is no longer subject to increase ‘ in consequence ’ (to use the words of the Permanent Settlement itself) ‘ of the im- provement of their respective estates.’ ” 1 As Sir James Stephen went on to say, to affirm, that because this has been done, the land has been freed from that liability to taxation which is the common liability of all property in all countries, is a confusion of thought against which it is superfluous to argue. Under Acts passed in 1871 and 1877, and consolidated by Bengal Act IX. of 1880, 1 Speech in the Legislative Council, 6th April 1871.
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