ikhs. Many of them believed that British rule was
the fulfilment of a prophecy of one of their martyred _gurus_, and the
Sikh regiments were regarded as the flower of the Native Army.

Yet it was in the Punjab, at Lahore and at Rawal Pindi, that the first
serious disturbances occurred in 1907 which aroused public opinion at
home to the reality of Indian unrest, and stirred the Government of
India to such strong repressive measures as the deportation of two
prominent agitators under an ancient Ordinance of 1818 never before
applied in such connexion. Local and temporary causes may to some extent
have accounted for those disturbances. An increase in the land revenue
demanded in the Rawal Pindi district was very strongly resented. The
regulations issued with regard to the tenure of land in some of the new
irrigation colonies were probably unwise and carried out with some
harshness. Famine in the unirrigated tracts, and especially the plague,
which had desolated parts of the province, had created much misery and
bitterness. Other and more remote causes of a social and economic
character had also been at work. Nowhere had Anglo-Indian legislation
and the introduction of elaborate forms of legal procedure produced
results more unfortunate and less foreseen by their authors than in the
Punjab. The conversion of the occupants of the land into full
proprietors was intended to give greater stability and security to the
peasant ownership of land, but the result was to improve the position of
the moneylender, who, owing to the thriftlessness of the Indian _rayat_
and the extravagant expenditure to which he is from time to time driven
by traditional custom in regard to marriages, funerals, and other family
ceremonies, has always played a disastrously important part in village
life. As M. Chailley remarks in his admirable study of these problems,
"the agricultural debtor had now two securities to offer." He had
always been able to pledge his harvest, and now he could pledge also his
land. On the other hand, "a strict system of law and procedure afforded
the moneylender the means of rapidly realizing his dues," and the
pleader, who is himself a creation of that system, was ever at the elbow
of both parties to encourage ruinous litigation to his own professional
advantage. Special laws were successively enacted by Government to check
these new evils, but they failed to arrest altogether a process which
was bringing about a veritable rev