THE OUTLYING REGIONS 
189 
insufficient (10), and he was liable to a fine (49) for each 
plough lost by the absconding of peasants. 
The collector was formally directed to deal with individual 
peasants, but the practice of farming a village was recog- 
nised (8, 9, 16, 39), and it may be inferred from the detailed 
provisions that farms were, at any rate, common. The 
collector was paid by a commission on the amount he realised; 
out of the total, he had to defray the salaries of his sanc- 
tioned staff (58), and the balance was his personal remunera- 
tion, so that he had a direct pecuniary interest in his work. 
In the case of these regulations, as of some others which 
have been examined in previous chapters, the only comment 
that is required is that their results must have depended 
mainly on the quality of the administration. An honest 
and zealous collector, under competent supervision, could 
have worked the system with satisfactory results; without 
these qualities, the life of the peasants could have been made 
almost intolerable. The numerous prohibitions show that 
abuses were expected, but their frequency is a matter of 
conjecture; and here, as elsewhere, the conditions of peasant- 
life must have depended very largely on the presence or 
absence of competition for land. So long as opportunities 
for migration existed, they set a limit to oppression Or ex- 
tortion; where the peasant was tied to his village by the 
want of any accessible refuge, a limit can scarcely be said 
to have existed. 
2. BENGAL 
The agrarian history of Bengal is of peculiar interest, 
because it was in Calcutta that the early British adminis- 
trators acquired the terminology which they carried with them 
to the North, and which combined with other circumstances 
to involve them in the mass of misconceptions described in 
Holt Mackenzie’s Memorandum: but for Bengal as a whole 
[ have found in the northern literature scarcely anything 
beyond the statement in the Ain (i. 389) that Akbar main- 
tained the methods of assessment which were in force at 
the time of annexation; and such information as I have 
been able to gather from the earlier sources relates only to 
a few villages along the Hiigli, which were possibly not