cted with the
larger question of land revenue, in regard to which there are signs of a
considerable change in the attitude of the politically-minded classes,
or at least of the Moderate section. For a long time the lawyer element,
always very strong in the Indian National Congress, was not particularly
keen to see it take up agrarian questions which would have probably
estranged a good many fat clients, and some, though perhaps fewer,
political supporters, amongst the land-owning classes. The old Congress
platform was, moreover, drawn up by and for the _intelligentsia_ of the
towns, who had little in common with the great rural population of
India; and in so far as it professed to champion also the agricultural
interests of the country, it preferred to concentrate its attacks on the
general system of Indian land revenue and to press for its revision on
the lines of the "permanent settlement" in Bengal--not so much perhaps
on account of any intrinsic merits of that "settlement," as because it
was identified with the province which was then regarded as in the van
of Indian political progress and enlightenment. The "permanent
settlement" in Bengal, effected more than a century and a quarter ago by
Lord Cornwallis under a complete misapprehension, as was afterwards
realised, of the position of the Bengalee _zemindars_, determined once
and for all the proportion of land revenue which Government was entitled
to collect in the province, instead of leaving it, as in other parts of
India it is still left, to be varied from time to time after periodical
inquiry into the constantly varying yield and value of the land. The
result in Bengal has been highly satisfactory from the point of view of
the large land-owners whose property has appreciated enormously with the
general growth of prosperity during a long period, unprecedented in its
earlier annals, of internal and external peace. It has been less
satisfactory to the tenants with inferior and infinitely subdivided
interests who have shared very little in the increased wealth of their
superior landlords, and nowhere else has sub-infeudation been carried to
such extravagant lengths. But for the State, above all, the results have
been singularly unfortunate, as it has debarred itself from taking toll
of the unearned increment that has been constantly accruing to the
_zemindars_.

So long as the National Congress saw little or no hope of securing the
transfer of any substantial share