interests of each cultivator distinct from, if not antagonistic to the village community, as a whole. In lieu of the common spirit of attachment, which unites such a community to its headman, it substituted a selfish detachment. It left in unfavourable seasons no common resources to meet difficulties. The system of settlement with village communities which Mr. Colvin introduced into Haidarábád is identical with the system adopted six years later in the North-West Provinces, and afterwards in the Punjab.
Mr. Colvin arrived, in the course of his short experience at Haidarábád, at another important conclusion, in which he anticipated the actual course of Settlement administration in Upper India. 'Metcalfe,' he wrote in 1830, a little later, 'has taken up the cudgels for the propriety of minute inquiry and settlement in Revenue assessments, in the most praiseworthy style. I am not an advocate for the Government officers managing directly and permanently with my old cronies the cultivating ryots themselves. But that, as a preliminary to any kind of management, the lands and separate helds of a village should be measured, and the scale of rate demandable on them be determined, seems so obviously true, as a rule to be observed in our own territories, where all instruments, means, and applications are our own, that I wonder at its being disputed. The work may be slow, but it is to be hoped that our Empire will be long. That progress is necessarily slow is no good reason why progress should not be made at all.' All this, though obvious
