THE 13tH AND l4tH CENTURIES 65 
weather, and a reasonable administration, a village would 
continue to function; failure of crops, or oppressive ad- 
ministration, might send the inhabitants elsewhere; later 
on, the village might be repopulated, either by its former 
inhabitants, or by new settlers, as the case might be; and 
another cycle in its history would then begin. 
The view that productive land was waiting for men with 
adequate resources is fully established by the agricultural 
policy of those sovereigns whose pronouncements are on 
record; their primary object was extension of cultivation, 
with an immediate increment of revenue accruing from each 
field brought under the plough. Two methods of securing 
this object are indicated in addition to administrative 
pressure. One of these was the provision of State irrigation 
works, so that, in the picturesque terms borrowed from 
Islamic law, the “dead lands” might be brought to life; this 
expedient was, so far as the chronicles show, practised only 
by Firtiz, and it does not again become prominent until the 
reign of Shahjahan. The other expedient was the grant 
of advances, which are mentioned particularly as the foun- 
dation of Muhammad Tughlaq’s attempts to restore the 
River Country, but in terms which imply that the practice 
was already familiar. It is safe to infer that capital was 
the principal requirement for the accepted policy of de- 
velopment; but the records show that, in this period, as in 
later times, State advances were apt to be embezzled by the 
officials employed in their distribution, and consequently 
the value of the expedient was in practice limited. For 
the second line of development, improvement in cropping, 
no practical measures are indicated in the chronicles; 
possibly some effect was produced by a combination of 
advances and administrative pressure, but we are not told 
of any actual progress in this direction. We have merely 
the praiseworthy aspirations of Kings or officials; the result 
1s matter for conjecture.