By common cart with an orga

nized system

........... • ......

1.9 pence per mile.

0.272

By a line of plate rails and bullock draft In this way he shews that, on plate rails with bullock draft, a charge of one penny per ton per mile would give a dividend of 121 per cent. In this calculation he has not stated clearly the time consumed in travelling each mile in each case: and that this must have an important influence on the calculation is evident, from the significant fact that, in England, with all its expensive system of railroads, and consequent high charges, 16,000,000 tons of goods are now yearly carried on railways, hauled by steam. Time is no doubt more valuable in England than it is in India; yet still it must be considered even here as an important element; and the length of road in India, that has to be traversed, will tell much in the calculation. Goods, which in England were carried by a steamer round the coast in a few days, or inland by waggon in the same time, are now taken by rail in one day, counting also the time for loading and unloading, which is the same for all lengths of carriage by rail. But here in India, goods, which would not reach Umballah with any certainty in three months, could be conveyed by steam rail to that station in forty-eight hours, at one-third of the cost! In the one case, days are compared with days; but, in the other, the comparison is with months-long tedious months of uncertainty, whether the goods will ever arrive or not.

We cannot conclude our notice of these two works more appropriately than in the words of Major Kennedy in his address to the Most Noble the Marquis of Dalhousie :"We 'cannot close this paper without expressing to your Lordship, our firm and daily encreasing conviction that, in whatever view one regards the interests of India-whether in respect to the application and consolidation of its Military power; the efficiency of its Civil Government; the development of its industrial and mercantile resources; the advancement of its native population; or the health and security of its European Residents, the first effectual impulse must consist in giving facilities to intercommunication through the instrumentality of Railways, which, we have not the least doubt, if properly managed, may be introduced with great profit to their undertakers."

6

6

ART. V.—1. A Digest of the Criminal Law of the Presidency of Fort William, compiled by F. L. Beaufort, B. C. S. 1850.

2. A few remarks on certain Draft Acts, commonly called the Black Acts, by Ram Gopaul Ghose.

3. Register of the Bengal Civil Service, by Ram Chunder Doss. 1845.

4. The Madras, Bengal, and Bombay Almanacs for 1850.

66

"THE laws of a nation," says Gibbon, when compressing into one memorable chapter the reading of half a lifetime and the contents of well-filled libraries, form the most instructive part of its history;" and yet, "a country governed solely by law," says Dr. Johnson, "will always be badly governed." It is with reference to the spirit of these observations that we would devote a few pages to the present state of our Criminal Law, on which recent agitation has most properly fixed the attention of the public.

The Criminal Law, which the magistrates and judges of Bengal and the North West Provinces administer, is scattered over some ten or twelve volumes of "Regulations.' It is moreover either obscured or illustrated by some three hundred and fifty "Constructions" and some seven hundred "Circular Orders ;" and it is regulated by certain fixed and undeviating rules of procedure. That this code of law is confused, ill-digested, and intricate; that it contains statutes, which are at variance with each other; that it is so scattered as to baffle research and mock inquiry; that it is mixed up with a variety of other laws, pertaining to the land revenue, the salt monopoly, the opium cultivation, and a dozen other various subjects; that it has some laws, which are obsolete from their severity, and others, which are obsolete from their inapplicability-are complaints, which the most common observer must have heard a hundred times in any Indian society. Some portion, however, of this imputed confusion and intricacy exists only in the brains of the speak ers; and the scattered nature of our criminal provisions is mainly the result of the progressive spirit of our Indian system, whether in legislation, or in political ascendancy. Most readers are aware that the era of 1793 is marked as that of the first Bengal Regulation. On that date were condensed into something of system and regularity all the rules of practice, or procedure, or prescription, which we had learnt in our previous experience of twenty-eight years. The foundations of a regular

code were then laid, broad and deep. As new provinces were added to the growing empire; as new abuses shewed themselves, for which no provision had, as yet, been made; as legislation was thought to produce evils worse than those it professed to cure; as public or private interests demanded more efficient protection; as rights became more complicated previous laws were variously extended or modified, added to or abrogated. A code, to be applicable to such a country and to such a people, could not at once spring into life, like Pallas from the head of Jupiter. We had to feel our way step by step. Territorial aggrandisement required the extension to new acquisitions of laws, either entire or in part. With a fresh territory came crimeof an aspect unknown before. Illegal violence grew bolder in the acquisitions of prior date. Government was not reluctant to re-consider its judgment, to confess an error in legislation, or to apply to recognised evils a more adequate remedy. Whatever may be the objections to our Criminal Law, as a whole, it must be allowed, that each of its provisions has been created to meet wants as they were successively felt, and evils to which a careful consideration had been given. Much of its diffuseness is unavoidably owing to our political circumstances and gradual expansion, (the same law being repeated for different provinces almost word for word over again,) to the complicated state of society, in which religious prejudices and the obligations of caste alternately aid and obstruct the course of justice, and to the national character. But even the bulk of these laws, so much the subject of complaint, has been well digested and reduced, by the labours of two civilians, into volumes of a size not calculated to alarm the most unlearned. And it is highly creditable to those men who were at the head of affairs in 1793, that, out of fifty-one laws, either condensed from former rules, or fresh forged in that single year, only ten have been repealed, and forty-one are still in daily and regular operation.

We shall hardly do justice to the difficulties of legislating for this country, without considering the state of society at the time of its acquirement. To legislate for a country newly conquered, where law has been unknown previously, and whose inhabitants are probably uncontaminated by its influence, is, it may be said, an easy task. A few clear provisions, scrupulous precision of diction, combined with a general applicability to all cases, attention to substance rather than to form and technicality, an open court, facility of access to the humblest suitor, patriarchal inflexibility in deciding between rich and poor, a stout constable, a strong pair of stocks, a clear highway-and the whole thing is complete. This may be very well suited to some

unsophisticated tribe, if such there be, in the South Seas, to the inhabitants of a Pitcairn's island, or to some community of Red Indians in the far West, in whose character manliness and truth, strength and obedience, are wonderfully linked together. But it will not avail men, who have to cope with the ingenious temperament of the Hindu, or the fierce intolerance of the Mussulman, and the habitual disregard of law, which more or less prevails with both races and in all parts of India. We have to legislate for a people, whose progenitors have compiled elaborate systems of civil and criminal jurisprudence to whom, even in the remotest villages, the forms of law courts and the mere technicality of pleadings are often not unfamiliar: who retain the skeleton, and care little for the substance: who, amongst themselves, are accustomed to exercise their natural acuteness in private suits and domestic quarrels: whose great men have taught them to regard laws mainly as instruments for the attainment of private ends: who on one day resist all legal authority, and on the next yield unresistingly to the most palpable invasion of their rights: in whose mind the dread of punishment probably never quelled one angry passion, and whose arm uplifted to strike was never withheld by the fear of any ultimate consequence: and who, at one and the same time, exhibit every crime that can spring from the apparently adverse sources of advanced civilization, and of primeval barbarism.

The most determined enemy of the Company cannot tax Government with unexampled severity, during the early stages of our rule, in quelling crimes of unusual extent, or in passing laws, which weighed heavily on national prejudice. It was not until the necessity became too obvious to require further discussion, that measures of even ordinary severity were adopted, or any deviation from an established course of procedure allowed. Occasionally however the law's delay has been temporarily set aside. An extraordinary commission stopped Dacoity, for the time, in several districts of Bengal, somewhere about the commencement of this century. A gigantic hunting expedition put down the Pindarís. By the employment of active and experienced officers, the atrocious system of Thuggí has been brought, first to light, and then to punishment. In these and other instances, the employment of unusual means, unencumbered by the trammels of form or official precedents, was amply justified by the magnitude of the evil. The only objection might be, that these remedies had been too long delayed. Nor can it be said that in allowing the law to take its course, in listening to the dictates of unwritten justice, in

asserting the paramount claims of reason and humanity over cant and intolerance, we were actuated by the spirit of intemperance or haste. Lord Wellesley indeed forbad the destruction of infants at Saugor; but a further period of twentyseven years had to elapse before the high-minded Bentinck could so far anticipate the opinion of this age as to direct the cessation of Suttí. And, with an acknowledgment of the supposed sacredness of locality or of individuals, at which posterity may smile, our Law Books, up to the year 1817, were actually defaced by a regulation, which exempted Brahmins in the city of Benares from the punishment of death adjudged to serious crimes. These distinctions between moderation and weakness, between mercy and pusillanimity, are far too subtle for men of practical common sense to appreciate; nor are similar concessions often accepted by any party in the spirit in which they are given. By the members of a proud priesthood they are regarded as deference paid to the antiquity of their religion, and the sacred character of its highest caste, or as the offspring of timidity. In the mind of the philosopher they awaken a feeling akin to contempt; and by the Christian, they are viewed with sorrow.

We will devote a page or two to the examination of some remarkable offences: and we commence with the most serious in character, the most vexatious in its immediate and remote effects of any that disgrace our calendar-Dacoity. To establish the crime of dacoity, or gang-robbery, it is necessary that a body of men should be shewn to have banded together, either with or without arms, by day or by night; to have proceeded, by force or intimidation, to break into a city, town, village, dwelling-house, tent, boat or abode of any individual; and to have carried off, or have attempted to carry off, from thence, such moveables, or property, as they may have been able to discover. The attack may or may not be marked by the more serious circumstances of the wounds, the torture, or the death, of one or more of the inmates of the place. But in nine cases (or so) out of ten, the features of the case, in Bengal Proper, are somewhat as follows. About one, two or three o'clock in the morning, the grihasta, or owner of the house, probably the most quiet and unoffending individual in the whole village, is rudely awakened by a crowd of men, who with blackened faces, heads enveloped in bandages, and torches in their hands, compel him to rise and shew them his hoarded store of rupees or jewels. Doubt or hesitation is instantly met by the application of a torch to the tenderest part of the person, or by the insertion of a sharp arrow in the back, or by the