tion of economic laws. It views, and I think rightly, such passing as a very grave political danger. Yet how to prevent it is a very difficult problem indeed. It is one which resembles in many points the problem of preventing the ruin of unthrifty people by money-lenders in England, which recently engaged the attention of a Committee of the House of Commons. It is easy to recognise the evil; it is easy to say that it must be put a stop to; but when we come to suggest practical remedies, we find ourselves met on all sides with difficulties which seem insurmountable. What remedies have been recommended by the Government of India, and what orders have been passed by the Secretary of State for India, I am not in a position to know. But I think it is no breach of official confidence to say that when a portion of the papers were circulated for opinion to particular officers, I noticed and entirely agreed with the view expressed by Sir Dennis Fitzpatrick, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Panjab, that what we are really concerned with is the keeping of the land in the hands of the agricultural tribes as a class; to keep hopelessly insolvent individuals in possession of petty holdings is a task beyond our power, and even if it were possible, the political expediency of doing so is more than doubtful. At any rate, I would venture to suggest that before resorting to drastic measures in the supposed interest of individuals we should endeavour to strengthen the position of the tribes as a body by legislating where necessary on the lines of the existing Customary Law. I have in my book given my reasons for objecting strongly to any attempt to codify that law, but there are one or two points in connection with it on which I think that legislation might be undertaken with advantage. I have said that it is very generally found to be the custom that an agriculturist cannot sell or mortgage his ancestral land, except for necessity. Whether it would be possible to frame a satisfactory legal definition of necessity may be doubtful, but I think that much litigation might be prevented if it were provided that a proprietor whose power of

THIRD SERIES. VOL. VII.

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alienation is restricted by Customary Law should give to some superior Revenue Officer, and through him to the agnates possessing the power of control, notice of the proposed alienation, and if the Revenue Office were empowered to inquire into the bonâ-fide nature of the facts alleged as constituting the necessity, and, where the necessity was established, to give the agnates an opportunity of exercising their right of pre-emption. The law of pre-emption certainly requires amendment. It is true that the Panjab Law Act, in which it is contained, does recognise custom as regulating the exercise of the right; but it only expressly recognises what I regard as the true foundation of the right, agnatic relationship, in the case of "villages held on ancestral shares," a phrase which has given rise to much litigation and to many erroneous decisions. It should also be provided that a person possessing the right of preemption should be entitled to exercise the right by payment of the fair market value of the land. It is contrary to all principles of Tribal Law that a stranger should be able by mere power of the purse-by paying a fancy price, even when this is fixed in good faith-to take ancestral land from the agnatic heirs who are able and willing to pay a fair price for it. Lastly, the law regarding mortgage by conditional sale should be radically amended or repealed altogether; in its present form it is wholly unsuited to the agriculturists of the Panjáb, and it compels the Courts to pass decisions which work cruel injustice, and which the Judges themselves feel to be little, if anything, short of scandalous.

What I have endeavoured thus to state may, I think, be summed up in the following brief propositions:

1. That, speaking generally, the land in the Panjab is still held by groups of peasant proprietors, forming village communities, bound together by the tie of agnatic kinship, and membership of a common tribe.

2. That these groups and communities follow in most matters, and particularly in matters relating to land, neither

the Hindu nor the Muhammadan Law, but customary rules of their own.

3. That these customary rules have a tribal origin, and are based on the perfectly intelligible and consistent principle of keeping the land in the tribe by a strict rule of agnatic succession.

4. That it is politically expedient that the land should remain in the possession of these tribal groups, and that any legislation which may be undertaken with regard to the land and its owners should be directed to maintaining and strengthening the true Customary or Tribal Law.

Space scarcely permits me to even allude to the very interesting question of the origin and growth of law generally which is naturally suggested by a study of the Customary Law of the Panjáb. I would merely remark that I think that in dealing with it we should draw a great distinction between the Criminal and the Civil Law. The Criminal Law may have originated in the Pathan Polestas, which, in its turn, may have originated in a semi-religious sanction, or may be merely the power of the strong to enforce obedience from the weak; but it appears to me that we have evidence on all sides that the origin of the Civil Law, especially as far as it regulates the succession to and enjoyment of land, is tribal custom-a custom formed, not by collecting and elaborating the decisions of chiefs, but by the public opinion of the "brotherhood" generally. The difference in the origin of the Criminal and the Civil Law is, I think, remarkably illustrated in the Old Testament. We find the Jewish Kings in matters of Criminal Law pure autocrats-they make what orders they please, and enforce them as they please; they punish arbitrarily men who they think deserve punishment, even though no positive order may have been disobeyed. They say to their young men, "Fall upon him," and they "fall upon him" without even the form of a trial. But in civil matters they are powerless. Land cannot even be taken

up for a public purpose on payment of most ample compensation against the will of its owner. King Ahab can only overcome the opposition of Naboth by the Oriental expedient of a false criminal charge.

But whatever may be the origin of law, civil or criminal, it appears to me clear that the first conception of property in land is that of tribal property. We find this not only in India, but also amongst the Scotch clans, and Irish septs, and the tribes of the islands of the South Pacific. It is only a natural development that the tribal idea should be succeeded by the family idea, and that the latter in its turn should give place to the idea of individual ownership. It would be vain and mischievous to attempt to restore by legislation a social condition that has passed away, or even to arrest natural development. I have little faith in the modern schemes of "Socialism" or "Collectivism," which appear to me schemes for restoring under another name a tribal state of society. On the other hand, much mischief is done by an inability or refusal to recognise a social state different from that in which we live ourselves. I believe that we did much mischief in Scotland, and much more in Ireland, when we failed to recognise the joint proprietary titles of the clans and septs, and turned the chiefs into English landlords. I believe, too, that much of our trouble with uncivilized tribes in the present day arises from attempts to enforce rights to tribal lands which .Englishmen believe themselves to have acquired from individuals who were by tribal custom quite incapable of making any valid grant. I believe that in the Panjáb we shall do serious mischief both socially and politically if, by failing to understand the true state of rural society in that Province, and ignoring the Customary Law which keeps that society together, we help to break up the village communities and to transfer their lands to strangers. Even if it be true that such a change is inevitable, it would be a great misfortune if the responsibility for it could be justly laid on the British Government.

THE NECESSITY FOR SANITARY AND ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM IN INDIA.

By C. W. MACRURY, F.R.C.S. ED., D.P.H. CAMB.,

Late Sanitary Commissioner for the Government of Bombay.

THE area of British India is a little over 1 million square miles (1,553,925), and contains 52,903.700 inhabited houses, being in the proportion of 34 to each square mile.

By the last census the total population was about 2874 millions (287,289,783), the average density being at the rate of 185 persons to the square mile. The three most densely populated provinces are Oudh with 513 persons, Bengal with 473 persons, and the North-West Provinces with 413 persons to the square mile.

Travancore and Cochin average 385 persons, and the British districts of Madras 252 persons to the square mile. There are 75 towns in India with a population exceeding 50,000, 29 of them having a population exceeding 100,000, and 6 a population exceeding 200,000.

In 1891 the largest of these was Bombay City and island, which, including the cantonment, had a population of 821,764, composed of all the races, nationalities and religions in the world, the vast majority of whom are living on sewage-sodden and water-logged soil in dark, ill-ventilated and overcrowded "chawls "--notoriously the fons et origo of the unhealthiness of the city, of which about half is undrained.

The sanitary field in such a vast area, and among such a teeming population, is immense, but practically it lies fallow, because Salus populi has not yet become Suprema lex in India. Plague is not a new visitor to India; there have been outbreaks of it in the Kumaon Hills in recent years, without either having caused a panic or spreading to other districts. The Rajpootana outbreak in 1836 was said to have originated from infected bales of cloth brought by Bunias from Guzerat, and the disease appears to be