agricultural population such as India possesses. This question of the protection of the forest in these early days of Forest Conservancy was aggravated by the Forest Officers in two ways. In the one the more zealous officer in charge of a newly demarcated area with all the boundaries laid down on the ground wished to keep to the strict letter of the law and thus from the outset press hardly on the people, instead of leading them by slow degrees to an understanding of the new regime; in the other by the slack or unnecessarily weak Forest Officer who wished to keep in with the people, and perchance with the officials of the district, and practically allowed the old state of affairs to go on almost unchecked. Both gave almost equal trouble in their several ways and put back the work of introducing real protection. For the first gave full cause for just resentment which often found support in high quarters, equally uneducated in matters pertaining to forestry, and thus put back forest progress in the particular district or even throughout a whole province; whilst the attitude of the second led people and official alike to believe that this matter of the protection of the forest was not really a necessity, a matter of life or disappearance of the forest estate, but merely a fad or desire of the new Forest Department to exert its authority over and oppress the people.

Can it be wondered at, therefore, that this matter of protection was the source of much friction and heart-burning out in the districts, and one of grave disquietude to those in authority who were resposible for introducing a proper system of conservancy into the forests? Fortunately, from the very magnitude of the task and areas which had to be dealt with, protection could only be introduced slowly, progress could only be made step by step. Thus this matter of introducing protection throughout the forests of India, not yet complete in the remoter parts, only proceeded gradually, and the bad mistakes in action or policy made at first were rectified and guarded against in other parts in later years.

Naturally the worst mistakes were made and the greatest friction was engendered in the provinces which had the largest population and the smallest areas of forest to satisfy its requirements; whereas owing to slower development in those with extensive areas of forest, as in the Central Provinces, for instance, matters were easier to deal with, and a strict protection was only introduced gradually.

The district Forest Officer himself had an unusually hard time

of it. The success or otherwise of the protective administration of his forests came to be gauged from tables submitted with the Annual Reports exhibiting the number of cases regarding forest offences taken into court as compared with the number of convictions obtained; and the number of cases voluntarily compounded with the Forest Officers under the provisions of the Forest Act. This was very far from being an ideal check, although it was admittedly a difficult matter to find a better. In a way it served to show that the people were not being unnecessarily harassed or oppressed by the forest officials; on the other hand, so far as convictions were concerned, it left the latter for many years almost entirely in the hands of the subordinate native magistracy, and, as has been said, this class failed to appreciate the importance of properly protecting the forests, and either failed to convict or let the offender off with a small and quite inadequate fine. Owing to the fact that of all classes of offences those committed within a forest area are the most difficult to bring home to an offender, since it is often the merest accident that an offender is caught in the act, this practice on the part of the magistrates proved most injurious; for it gave rise to a class of offenders who habitually broke the forest law and stole material from the forests for sale, or otherwise, and gladly paid the small fine inflicted in the rare cases in which they were caught and convicted. By the end of the period dealt with here (1900) the percentage of convictions had, however, risen to 81 per cent, which sufficiently proved the carefulness exercised by the forest officials in prosecuting offences in court. The tabular method of gauging the efficiency of a forest district left much to be desired, and it was ultimately recognised that the true gauge of an efficient protection was the present state of each individual forest. This cannot be exhibited in tables. That the protection of the forest tracts under adequate conservancy by the end of this period had reached a high degree of efficiency, so far as fire, grazing and illicit felling was concerned, was admitted. The exceptional cases where the forest property of the State was decreasing in productive power and consequently in value was usually not due to inadequate protection, but to the existence and exercise of rights within the areas which were in excess of the potential capabilities of the forest and therefore destructive to improvement, or, less usually, to the rapid growth within the tracts of undefined privileges. The extinction of such rights and privileges was usually not

within the power of the forest officials, although they fully recognised the inevitable results on the forest of their continued enjoyment by the holders.

Next to fire protection the grazing question had to be dealt with. In a previous chapter it has been shown that the population of India in olden time was largely a nomadic pastoral one, the flocks being grazed in the areas adjacent to the locality occupied by their owners. Constant warfare was carried on against the forest in order to clear it away, or at least so lighten the overhead cover by felling sufficient of the trees to enable crops of grass to be obtained. Fire and the axe were the chief weapons employed by the people in this constant struggle against the great forests which covered the country in those ancient times, and this warfare was still in active progress at the time the British first began to extend dominion over the country, and was continued for some sixty years thereafter before an initial attempt was made to institute some check on this universal practice of regarding the forest areas as the grazing grounds of the people. The herds of cattle of both sexes thus turned loose in the forests were of an excessively poor type, the outcome of unsupervised interbreeding, the animals unclean and half starved, and the milk obtained from them of a very inferior quality; a good cow of this kind only yielding three quarts a day, whilst the hides obtainable were of very inferior quality. In periods of scarcity and famine, following a failure of the monsoon rains, millions of these miserable beasts were swept away. Some regulation of unrestricted grazing became necessary in the Government Reserves, and its introduction was the source of great trouble and not a little friction, as in the case of the introduction of fire conservancy.

The dangerous effects of erosion, especially in the drier parts of the country, formed another branch of protection work with which the Forest Officer had to deal. Some aspects of this matter have been already glanced at, whilst others will be dealt with later.

Another side of the protection work of the forest which had received but scant attention during the period here dealt with, was the injury caused to the crops from insect and fungus attacks. This aspect of protection will be alluded to towards the close of this chapter.

The progress made in these various forms of forest protection will be now considered.

SHIFTING CULTIVATION

This history will have abundantly shown that the practice of shifting cultivation had been in force amongst all the aboriginal tribes throughout the forest areas in India from time immemorial. It was one of the first of several pernicious customs which prevailed amongst the people which Forest Officers endeavoured to put down. A considerable period of years elapsed before the Government realised that steps would have to be taken to combat this wasteful form of utilising the forests. By the end of the century in the provinces (except Madras) and in Burma, with the introduction of proper Forest Conservancy, shifting cultivation was gradually prohibited in all Reserved Forests and restricted as became possible in Protected and Unclassed Forests, although in the latter category it persisted in the wilder parts of the country, especially in Assam and North Burma, till the close of the period under review. In Burma it was taken advantage of (as will be shown in Chapter XVIII) to form teak plantations. The prohibition of the method could only take place gradually in the wilder tracts, since the jungle tribes who practised it had no other means of cultivating the land, and only by a process of gradual civilisation was it possible to bring them to settle down and take up a higher form of agriculture and forsake the nomadic system of life they preferred and were accustomed to. But the results of the activities and perseverance of the officers of the Department in this direction have saved to India a great forest estate becoming yearly of higher value, an estate which is of incalculable value to the population of the country.

As has been shown, the Madras Government, under Cleghorn's advice, prohibited this form of cultivation (kumri), but subsequently withdrew the prohibition, chiefly owing to their unwillingness to settle the rights to village and waste lands. This mistake resulted in great injury to the country and its inhabitants. In1863 Brandis and Cleghorn had drawn up a joint Memorandum, which was sent to the Government of Madras, urging the necessity of the early demarcation of the Government and village forests of the Presidency. The proposals were not approved, and in spite of persistent representations made by the Government of India on this subject, no adequate action was taken by the Madras Government towards effecting a separation of the various rights and interests in the public

forests and waste lands until Brandis was deputed to Madras and the Madras Forest Act was passed in 1882. And kumri cultivation, which Cleghorn had got prohibited in 1860, enjoyed this long new lease of life to the detriment of the forests of the presidency.

THE PROGRESS OF FIRE PROTECTION

From what has been already written on the custom of the people of annually firing the forests, either of direct intention or from carelessness, it will be easily understood that the problem of introducing a proper and effective fire conservancy of the forests into India was one of extreme difficulty. The climate of the greater part of the country was of a nature to favour the spread of a fire during the torrid, rainless months of the hot season when the forests are full of inflammable materials, But the opposition and obstructions offered to the introduction of methods to protect the forests from this danger would not have been so general in every province had not the new policy interfered with the immemorial custom of the people in setting fire to the rank dry grass in the hot weather in order to get up a new crop with the first rains; these fires once lit were allowed to run their own course, and were often fanned and spread over a considerable area by the strong hot wind which blows at this season. Fires for centuries past had spread in this way from the clearings made for shifting cultivation, the people practising this form of cultivation rarely taking the trouble to protect them from fire or to prevent the fire spreading outwards from the clearing through the neighbouring forests. The Karens in N.E. Burma and the people of the Garo Hills in Assam were exceptions in this respect, for both tribes took some trouble to prevent fire from entering or spreading from their clearings.

In every Province, therefore, the officers of the Department had to commence the work of introducing fire conservancy for the protection of the forests in the face of an actively hostile population more or less supported by the district officials, and especially by the Indian officials, who quite frankly regarded the new policy of fire conservancy as an oppression of the people. As has been shown, the Forest Officers themselves in the earlier days of the Department were openly sceptical of the possibility of protecting the forests from this calamity. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that the progress was slow, and that the factor of the individual