pancy
tenants. The following extract from a description of the Maratha
villages by Grant Duff [53] may be subjoined to this passage:
"The inhabitants are principally cultivators, and are now either
Mirasidars or Ooprees. These names serve to distinguish the tenure
by which they hold their lands. The Oopree is a mere tenant-at-will,
but the Mirasidar is a hereditary occupant whom the Government cannot
displace so long as he pays the assessment on his field. With various
privileges and distinctions in his village of minor consequence,
the Mirasidar has the important power of selling or transferring his
right of occupancy at pleasure. It is a current opinion in the Maratha
country that all the lands were originally of this description."

As regards the internal relations of clans and village groups, Sir
H. Maine states: "The men who composed the primitive communities
believed themselves to be kinsmen in the most literal sense of
the word; and, surprising as it may seem, there are a multitude of
indications that in one stage of thought they must have regarded
themselves as equals. When these primitive bodies first make their
appearance as landowners, as claiming an exclusive enjoyment in a
definite area of land, not only do their shares of the soil appear to
have been originally equal, but a number of contrivances survive for
preserving the equality, of which the most frequent is the periodical
redistribution of the tribal domain." [54] Similarly Professor
Hearn states: "The settlement of Europe was made by clans. Each
clan occupied a certain territory--much, I suppose, as an Australian
squatter takes up new country. The land thus occupied was distributed
by metes and bounds to each branch of the clan; the remainder, if any,
continuing the property of the clan." [55] And again: "In those cases
where the land had been acquired by conquest there were generally
some remains of the conquered population who retained more or less
interest in the lands that had once been their own. But as between
the conquerors themselves it was the clansmen, and the clansmen only,
who were entitled to derive any advantage from the land that the clan
had acquired. The outsiders, the men who lived with the clan but were
not of the clan, were no part of the folk, and had no share in the
folkland. No services rendered, no participation in the common danger,
no endurance of the burden and heat of the day, could create in an
outsider any colour of rig