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more favourable to their position than that which had been accorded to them in the Provisional Settlement operations at the time in progress, has been the excuse for much misplaced denunciation of the policy of land-administration, of which Mr. Thomason was the most distinguished advocate in the North-West Provinces, and which Lord Lawrence had rigorously enforced in the Punjab. It may be sufficiently described as a system which looked with disfavour on the various landlord interests, which in India have a tendency to grow up between the State on the one hand and the original owner and actual cultivator of the soil on the other. It has sometimes been even asserted that the area of the insurrection was co-extensive with that in which this policy had been allowed free play, and that, in fact, it was one of the motive causes of which the Mutiny was an effect. It would be difficult, without plunging into a still existent controversy, to set forth the grounds on which such a view is regarded by an important school of Indian administrators as unsound and fallacious. It is true, no doubt, that the curtailment of their privileges did incline the Oudh Tálukdárs to take part against the rulers who had ordered that curtailment. It is true too, that the Oudh peasantry were unable to resist the combined influences of the Tálukdárs and the mutinous soldiery, and joined with them in assailing the power, whose main object had been the improvement of their condition. It may be conceded, moreover, that the liberal concessions made to the