1 Annexation — and After. 217
2 spirit of those laws, were instructed to base their
3 procedure as far as possible on native customs and
4 institutions. For administrative purposes the country
5 was mapped out into districts small enough to enable
6 the officer in charge of each to gain a complete
7 knowledge of and exercise a personal influence over
8 its population, and every such officer was entrusted
9 with judicial, fiscal, and magisterial powers. The
10 position of these district officers was in fact not
11 unlike that of the kdrddrs in the days of Ranjit
12 Singh, and the people in consequence saw nothing
13 unfamiliar in the extent and diversity of their powers.
14 But though the new system resembled the old in its
15 organization, it differed from it in every other par-
16 ticular, and nowhere was this difference more marked
17 than in matters relating to the collection of revenue.
18 Previous to 1849, the heavy transit and customs
19 dues, combined with the badness and insecurity of
20 the roads, rendered the exportation of grain an
21 impossibility, and at the same time paralysed internal
22 trade, and that to such an extent that the people of
23 one district often starved for want of food while plenty
24 reigned in the districts around them. Of the forty-
25 eight imposts levied by Ranjit Singh only six were
26 retained under the new regime ; salt was the sole
27 commodity subject to import duty, and that was col-
28 lected only along the line of the North- West Frontier.
29 The burden of the cultivator was similarly lightened.
30 "We have substituted," wrote Ibbetson in 1881, "a
31 fixed and moderate if inelastic assessment of land
32 revenue for a demand about which the only certainty
33 was that it would be excessive. The Sikhs often