sent existing code, will admit that in many cases under existing circumstances that code requires no remodelling.

It is too often the habit to ascribe to Indian legislators, a deficiency in philosophic reasoning, and employing the sarcasm of Burke to state, that if they attempt to go but one step beyond the immediate sensible qualities of things they go out of their depth,' the censure is misplaced: they are as they are ex necesitate. Still it must be regretted that principles should be so little dealt with, and that crimes which involve many different shades of moral turpitude should have the same punishment. Forgery, arson, rape, perjury, adultery and affray with violent breach of the peace are classed together. Gambling which is so common amongst the lower classes of the natives in these territories is left out of the schedule, and is punished under the general regulations; and the law of honour which is not recognized amongst them is more binding than the law of the land. Perhaps the reason, that anomalies like these have so long been allowed to exist, is that Indian law to most readers is a closed book. It is unfortunate too that such digests of it, as have yet been published, should not be more attractive in their manner of treatment. It is indeed much to be regretted that those who have written on Indian law, Henry Carre Tucker, Skipwith, Beaufort, Macpherson, and Thomason should be compilers and should have simply restricted themselves to dry digests, or abstracts. To this general rule Beaufort furnishes a solitary but not a brilliant exception, and his work nowhere abounds in that terse and concise language, nowhere shews that lucid eloquence in unfolding principles, that calm disquisition in separating the specious from the true, that philosophical accuracy in making statements, that clever acumen in exposing sophistry which at once distinguish and characterize the legacies of Montesquieu, and Blackstone.

The administration of the Saugor and Nerbudda territories has given rise to much discussion. The present system of administration differs considerably from that of Oude, or of the Punjab. Though a non-regulation province, there is not as in other nonregulation provinces, the same uniformity of system, or the same simplicity of procedure. There are too some anomalies inseparable from the want of uniformity in the Revenue and Judicial administration. Indeed in one sense the government of these territories has been an experimental one. From the time when these territories were first acquired, when in 1819 the political resident at Bundlekhund first suggested that they should be divided into seven districts, and that one Commissioner and four

Assistants should constitute its staff of officers, to the present day, new officers have been appointed according to the exigencies and requirements of the work, and the rules already in force in the older regulation provinces introduced as necessity required. Several years elapsed before a civil or sessions Judge was appointed. To this day, it retains the same cumbrous form of administering civil justice, entirely through native functionaries, which during Lord Ellenborough's time elicited so much comment.*

The Commissioner has always had the chief general control of these districts. The civil and sessions Judge exercises the highest judicial and civil jurisdiction. In judicial matters, while exercising original jurisdiction in the trial and final disposal of criminals committed by Magistrates, his is the highest appellate authority in these territories, with regard to all judicial cases decided beyond the limitations of Act VI. of 1803 by Magistrates or their assistants. Deputy Commissioners are invested with full Magisterial powers. The judicial powers of a Magistrate in India are so well known that it requires an apology to allude to them here. The principal cases to which his jurisdiction extends are burglary, where the offence has not been committed with murder, wounding, or corporal injury, or where the criminal has not before

*This scale indicates the annual cost of the administrative and ministerial Establishment as furnished to Mr. Ricketts.

This return was furnished before, Major Pinkeney was appointed to Jhansie; and does not shew the strength of the civil establishment or the Tahsildars.

† See Mr. Ricketts' report.

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committed this crime, or where he has not at the time been employed as a watchman, guard, or police officer, or where the value of the goods does not exceed 100 Rs; theft unaccompanied by these aggravating circumstances, or where the property does not exceed 300 hundred Rupees, receiving stolen property, affrays and assaults.* His assistants and deputies exercise criminal jurisdiction in all cases that may be referred to them for trial. They exercise the judicial powers of a Magistrate, or the special or ordinary powers of an assistant. In these Territories a preliminary examination in Law and procedure is necessary to the attainment of more enlarged powers. The furor manifested for examinations is indicative of good. When in 1858 Lord Stanley in the House of Commons said 'that competitive examination will prove itself 'stronger than all parliaments, and all Governments, and superior 'to all influences brought to bear against it,' he expressed an idea which was to become a fact long before 1861. In England the middle class examinations and the examinations held by the Society of Arts were opposed much in the same manner as the old Indian Bureau opposed examinations in India. In the Saugor and Nerbudda territories the examinations have resulted in making every officer more conversant with the nature of the duties he has to perform.

While much praise has been due to the zeal, energy, and ability of the European officers of these territories, those who have read Mr. Caldecott's report will perhaps find something to regret in the too extensive native agency employed in the administration : Mr. Caldecott called attention to the necessity of a strict surveillance on the conduct of the native officials employed. He did not think much either of their intelligence, or of the purity of their morals. And Mr. Caldecott was right. To the extortion, bribery, and corruption that was subsequently found to prevail among the native Sudder Ameen and native assistants, was owing Lord Ellenborough's first change in the administration of these provinces. With no ideas of moral right and wrong, with no recognition of the restraints of conscience, with scarcely any education, the native of India is generally entrusted with far larger powers than can judiciously be given him. Writing as we do, we are only echoing the opinions of some of the best judges of native character. Sir Barnes Peacock has said.

'His laborious duties, and the limited period of his holding 'office, did not allow of his visiting various parts of India, in

*For the other cognizable misdemeanours, let the Reader refer to the Schedule of April 11, 1850.

order to collect local information, or to ascertain, by personal ex'perience how the laws worked and were administered. He had 'heard much of the corruption of the native police, and of the 'inefficiency, to say the least of it, of the native judges, and often 'when a law was proposed by one person he was told by another 'that the police would convert it into means of extortion or 'that the native judges could not safely be trusted with its ad'ministration. The nature of these difficulties were such as 'almost to have appalled and overwhelmed him.' Nor is Sir Barnes Peacock the only English Gentleman who has held this opinion, Sir Henry Miers Elliott, and Sir Henry Lawrence used to express their unwillingness to give natives extensive powers. Another officer whose insight into character and whose experience through a long Indian career should lend weight to his assertions thus writes. Profligacy, fraud and peculation among the 'native servants of the state are inseparable from the education, or rather the want of education which has been theirs. It is 'only, the explosion of some gigantic fraud that creates a ripple on the smooth current of official business. By Anglo Indian ' officials such disclosures are accepted with stoical indifference as part of an unalterable system; while among the natives it creates only an irritation at the stupidity of one of their kindred in having betrayed a want of that low cunning considered 'by many as indispensable to the education of a man of business. "The culprit is looked upon as having brought disgrace on the community from his want of tact. The moral guilt is of no consequence; success alone makes the hero.'

It is to be regretted that native agency should be so largely employed in these territories. It is only by the more extensive introduction of European agency into the administrative machinery, that our great expectations of Indian progress can be realized. If one truth more than any other is rapidly gaining ground, it is this, that the oriental form of Government must give place to one based on constitutional ideas; the triumphs of the Indian Government ought to be like the triumphs of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century; triumphs as well over social errors, as over the material universe. It is only by the introduction of European capital and by the employment of European energy, that we are to expect those splendid results which the great and undeveloped physical resources at our command promise. As we write we can picture to ourselves what in a single decade of good Government might be effected. Territories like these afford the best illustration of the valuable nature of our acquisitions in the East; they shew how the

energy and ability of a few European officers, in a space of time scarcely stretching over forty years, have restored much of their original prosperity to vast tracts ravaged by war; how agriculture has been fostered, and how just laws and wholesome discipline have tended to the maintenance of internal peace.