e gradually reduced to about two-thirds of what it was when
our rule began, to less than one-half of what Sir John Malcolm, and
all the other local authorities, and even the worthy Marquis of
Hastings himself, under the influence of their opinions, expected it
would be. The land revenues of the native princes of Central India,
who reduced their public establishments, which the new order of
things seemed to render useless, and thereby diminished the only
markets for the raw produce of their lands, have been everywhere
falling off in the same proportion; and scarcely one of them now
draws two-thirds of the income he drew from the same lands in 1817.

There are in the valley of the Nerbudda districts that yield a great
deal more produce every year than either Orchha, Jhansi, or Datiya;
and yet, from the want of the same domestic markets, they do not
yield one-fourth of the amount of land revenue. The lands are,
however, rated equally high to the assessment, in proportion to their
value to the farmers and cultivators. To enable them to yield a
larger revenue to Government, they require to have larger
establishments as markets for land produce. These establishments may
be either public, and paid by Government; or they may be private, as
manufactories, by which the land produce of these districts would be
consumed by people employed in investing the value of their labour in
commodities suited to the demand of distant markets, and more
valuable than land produce in proportion to their weight and bulk.[7]
These are the establishments which Government should exert itself to
introduce and foster; since the valley of the Nerbudda, in addition
to a soil exceedingly fertile, has in its whole line, from its source
to its embouchure, rich beds of coal reposing for the use of future
generations, under the sandstone of the Satpura and Vindhya ranges,
and beds no less rich of very fine iron. These advantages have not
yet been justly appreciated; but they will be so by and by.[8]

About half-past four in the afternoon of the day we reached Datiya, I
had a visit from the Raja, who came in his palankeen, with a very
respectable, but not very numerous or noisy, train, and he sat with
me about an hour. My large tents were both pitched parallel to each
other, about twenty paces distant, and united to each other at both
ends by separate 'kanats', or cloth curtains. My little boy was
present, and behaved extremely well in steadily refusing, wit