1830.] the Renewal of Ike Company's Charter. 677 



vants of the Company had a perverse pleasure in misrule and gratuitous 

 oppression. 



No man in possession of his reason would attribute blame to a tra- 

 veller toiling over the defiles of Mount Caucasus, or even ploughing his 

 way through the sands of Prussia, for not proceeding with the same 

 rapid regularity as the Bristol mail. Still less would the commander 

 of the fastest and best appointed frigate in the British navy be brought 

 to a court-martial for not sailing within two points of the wind. Why, in 

 the name of all that is fair and candid, should the rule of estimation cease 

 to be considerate as soon as it is applied to moral exertions, and moral 

 hindrances ? Why, but because pseudo-philosophers cannot spare time 

 or acuteness to calculate with any nicety the quantum of resistance that 

 has been overcome, and the consequent power and value of the machi- 

 nery, that has carried on its operations, however slowly and imperfectly, 

 in despite of such opposition. Or, because they have drawn, in their 

 own imaginations, a formal and inflexible line of demarcation between 

 that which is good and that which is evil in legislation and the admi- 

 nistration of the laws, in matters of police and taxation, and all the 

 thousand points at which an absolute government comes in contact with 

 the people, with utter ignorance or disregard of those facts and circum- 

 stances which often make that relatively good, which partakes, in an 

 absolute sense, more or less largely of the opposite principle. 



A single example will suffice, perhaps, to explain our meaning. Mr. 

 Rickards has devoted a section, at page 263 of his second volume, to the 

 consideration of the crime of gang-robbery in Bengal, which he attempts, 

 with his usual felicity, to trace to the system of land-revenue. " It 

 seems/' he says, " to have been unsuccessfully prosecuted, and almost 

 with impunity, till the year 1808." et In 1808, this tremendous evil 

 was somewhat checked," but there are " numerous complaints on record, 

 of the continued existence" of the crime. " So late as the 20th October, 

 1824, the Court of Directors, in their letter to the Bengal government, 

 express themselves sorry to find that heinous crimes had been committed 

 in the Lower Provinces, in 1819, to a greater extent than in 1818. The 

 number of decoities, (gang-robberies), they add, attended with torture 

 or wounding, increased from 48 to 84 ; and the total number of decoities 

 from 217 to 336. There was also a great increase of robberies and 

 thefts of various kinds, attended with murder and wounding." 



Mr. Rickards proceeds, " Down, therefore, to the period here men- 

 tioned, we have recorded proof of the continued existence of decoity in 

 the royal provinces, to a most distressing extent, notwithstanding all the 

 measures and expedients which had been resorted to for twenty pre- 

 ceding years to suppress it." 



Now it is certainly an evil greatly to be deplored that gang-robbery 

 should exist at all, that 336 crimes of such enormity, attended, as they 

 too frequently are, with the most horrible aggravations of torture and 

 cruelty, should be perpetrated in one year. But who would not con- 

 clude from the language in which Mr. Rickards speaks of the continued 

 existence of decoity, notwithstanding the efforts of twenty years for its 

 suppression, that the offence still prevailed with little less than pristine 

 intensity; that the midnight marauder carried on his bloody trade, 

 under the tacit encouragement afforded by a system of police utterly 

 inefficient ; and that the peaceable inhabitants still suffer under a scourge 

 little less severe than that to which they were subjected in 1808 ? This 

 most assuredly is the impression that it is calculated we trust not in- 



