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
