68 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA
maintain smaller men on the same terms; and, while some
land was Reserved to provide revenue for the King, it is
probable that the great bulk of the kingdom was ad-
ministered through assignees rather than salaried officials.
The attitude of the Afghan officers towards their Assign-
ments can be inferred from the fact that at one time they
set up a claim! to treat them as heritable; but the King
insisted on a clear distinction between private property,
which would be distributed according to the law of in-
heritance, and public offices and Assignments, in which no
vested or contingent rights accrued. Subject, however,
to this distinction, the facts on record justify the statement
that the Afghan assignees had something like a free hand
in the management of the land, and the peasants, placed
under them. It is easy therefore to understand the silence
of the chroniclers regarding general orders during this
period; the only order of the kind which I have noticed is
that which was issued by Ibrihim Lodi requiring that
collections should be made only in grain.?
The reasons for this order, and its duration, are matters
of some little interest. The chronicler attributes it to low
prices resulting from uniformly good harvests, but there are
grounds for thinking that scarcity of the precious metals
was the decisive factor. The prevailing cheapness ex-
tended, we are told, to all classes of merchandise, not merely
agricultural produce, while ‘gold and silver were procurable
only with the greatest difficulty”; and this is only another
way of saying that the precious metals had appreciated. A
probable interpretation of these statements is that the
course of trade at this period did not bring the precious
metals into Northern India in sufficient quantities to
satisfy the demand, which is one of the permanent economic
features of this region. Adequate supplies could be ob-
tained only through the seaports of Bengal and Gujarat.
When one or other of these tracts was under the rule of
Delhi, trade could move freely, and, apart from trade, the
revenue could come up country in cash; when they were
independent, and cut off from Delhi by lawlessness along
the roads, there would be no remittance of revenue, and trade
1 Elliot, iv. 327. 2 Elliot, iv. 476.
