entury since the first step
was taken to arrest the ruin of the peasantry, the legislature of India
has again tried to solve for the whole country these four difficulties
which all past landed regulations have intensified--to give the state
tenants a guarantee against uncertain enhancements of rent, and against
taxation of improvements; to minimise the evil of taking rent in cash
instead of in kind by arranging the dates on which rent is paid; and to
mitigate if not prevent famine by allowing relief for failure of crops.
As pioneering, the work of Carey and his colleagues all through was
distinctly hindered by the treatment of the land question, which at
once ground down the mass of the people and created a class of
oppressive landlords destitute for the most part of public spirit and
the higher culture. Both were disinclined by their circumstances to
lend an ear to the Gospel, but these circumstances made it the more
imperative on the missionaries to tell them, to teach their children,
to print for all the glad tidings. Carey, himself of peasant
extraction, cared for the millions of the people above all; but his
work in the classical as well as the vernacular languages was equally
addressed to their twenty thousand landlords. The time of his
work--before Bentinck; and the centre of it--outside the metropolis,
left the use of the English weapon against Brahmanism largely for Duff.

When Cornwallis, following Warren Hastings, completed the substitution
of the British for the Mohammedan civil administration by a system of
courts and police and a code of regulations, he was guilty of one
omission and one mistake that it took years of discussion and action to
rectify. He did not abolish from the courts the use of Persian, the
language of the old Mussulman invaders, now foreign to all parties; and
he excluded from all offices above L30 a year the natives of the
country, contrary to their fair and politic practice. Bengal and its
millions, in truth, were nominally governed in detail by three hundred
white and upright civilians, with the inevitable result in abuses which
they could not prevent, and oppression of native by native which they
would not check, and the delay or development of reforms which the few
missionaries long called for in vain. In a word, after making the most
generous allowance for the good intentions of Cornwallis, and
conscientiousness of Shore, his successor, we must admit that Carey was
called to