Just when Tods was in the bloom of his power, the Supreme
Legislature were hacking out a Bill, for the Sub-Montane Tracts, a
revision of the then Act, smaller than the Punjab Land Bill, but
affecting a few hundred thousand people none the less. The Legal
Member had built, and bolstered, and embroidered, and amended that
Bill, till it looked beautiful on paper. Then the Council began to
settle what they called the "minor details." As if any Englishman
legislating for natives knows enough to know which are the minor and
which are the major points, from the native point of view, of any
measure! That Bill was a triumph of "safe guarding the interests of
the tenant." One clause provided that land should not be leased on
longer terms than five years at a stretch; because, if the landlord
had a tenant bound down for, say, twenty years, he would squeeze the
very life out of him. The notion was to keep up a stream of
independent cultivators in the Sub-Montane Tracts; and
ethnologically and politically the notion was correct. The only
drawback was that it was altogether wrong.
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