no school in the world better adapted for training
thoroughbred ruffians (men without any scruple of conscience, sense
of honour, or feeling of humanity) than the camp of a revenue-
contractor in Oude. It has been the same for the last thirty years
that I have known it, and must continue to be the same as long as _we
maintain, in absolute sway over the people, a sovereign who never
bestows a thought upon them, has no feeling in common with them, and
can never be persuaded that his high office imposes upon him the
obligation to labour to promote their good, or even to protect them
against the outrage and oppression of his own soldiers and civil
officers_. All Rajah Bukhtawar Sing's brothers and nephews were bred
up in such camps, and are thorough-bred ruffians.

They have got the lands which they hold by much fraud and violence no
doubt, but they have done much good to them. They have invited and
established in comfort great numbers of the best classes of
cultivators from other districts, in which they had ceased to feel
secure, and they have protected and encouraged those whom they found
on the land. To establish a new cultivator of the better class, they
require to give him about twenty-five rupees for a pair of bullocks;
for subsistence for himself and family till his crops ripen, thirty-
six more, for a house, wells, &c., thirty more, or about ninety
rupees, which he pays back with or without interest by degrees. Every
village and hamlet is now surrounded by fine garden cultivation,
conducted by the cultivators of the gardener caste, whom the family
has thus established.

The greatest benefit conferred upon the lands which they hold has
been in the suppression of the fearful contests which used to be
perpetual between the small proprietors of the military classes,
among whom the lands had become minutely subdivided by the law of
inheritance, about boundaries and rights to water for irrigation.
Many persons used to be killed every year in these contests, and
their widows and orphans had to be maintained by the survivors. Now
no such dispute leads to any serious conflict. They are all settled
at once by arbitrators, who are guided in their decisions by the
accounts of the Putwaries of villages and Canoongoes of districts.
These men have the detailed accounts of every tenement for the last
hundred years; and, with their assistance, village traditions, and
the advice of their elders, all such boundary disputes and
mis