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of this name; but the fact that it is entirely a municipal collection for the specific aim of investing the proceeds in the improvement of the sanitation of the place,—and thereby for the benefit of the pilgrim community, makes it far from a pilgrim tax proper in the real sense of the term. The attempt, however, of the Palitana Durbar to levy a tax of Rs. 2 per pilgrim from outside the State, and Rs. 5 on every Jain within the State whether or not the said Jain makes a pilgrimage to the Hill is of vastly different character. It is a poll-tax of the worst description. Apart froin the rights of the subjects of the State itself, which are being ridden roughshod over by this attempt of the State, there are the rights of the British subjects, who pay no such invidious poll-tax in their own territory, and whom the State of Palitana has no right to tax in this invidious manner. In the past the State was for a time permitted to levy such a rate; but that was in the period when the old agreement for the lump sum payment in consideration of the services of the State was under revision; and the levy was permitted to obtain some definite, fair measure, of the sum that ought to be paid by the Shrawaks to the Durbar. For such a state of things there may, in the circumstances of the day, have been some justification. But that cannot be used now as a precedent for making an indiscriminate tax levy of the kind proposed.
