and over a large part of it the State does actually take to itself a share of the gross produce which fully represents ordinary rent. Yet this is the very country in -which the poverty of the masses is so abject that millions live only from hand to mouth, and when there is any-even a partial-failure of the crops, thousands and hundreds of thousands are in danger of actual starvation.... Moreover, I could not fail to observe, when I was connected with the Government of India, that the portions of that country which have grown in wealth are precisely that past of it in which the Government has parted with its power of absorbing rent, by having agreed to a Permanent Settlement. . . . There are two questions-tile first is whether we are quite sure that the wealth of Lower Bengal would ever have arisen if its sources had not been thus protected; and the second is - whether, even now, it is quite certain that any Government, even the best, spends wealth better for the public interests than those to whom it belongs by the natural processes of acquisition" (ARGYLL).

"Wherever we find the land unappropriated, whether amongst Zulus, or Red Indians, or Maories, or roving Tartars in Central Asia, we find a savage and degraded state of mankind, and we find, almost invariably, that the first step in civilization is coincident with the private appropriation and careful cultivation of the soil. So far from the sweeping generalizations of Mr. George being true, that human misery and degradation have sprung from private ownership of land, we find, from actual survey of the earth at the present time, that precisely the opposite is true-that human misery is deepest where the land is not appropriated, and