VALLEY OF THE SOANE. 165 
the consequent downfall of the system. Davee, they say, allowed the 
British to punish them, because a certain gang had murdered the 
mothers to obtain their daughters to be sold to prostitution. 
Major Sleeman has constructed a map demonstrating the niet of 
* Bails,” or regular stations for committing murder, in the kingdom 
of Oude alone, which is 170 miles long by 100 broad, wherein are 
274, which are regarded by the Thuggee with as much satisfaction and 
interest as a game-preserve is in England. Nor are these Bails less 
numerous in other parts of India. Of twenty assassins who were 
examined, one frankly confessed to having been engaged in 931 
murders, and the least guilty of the twenty, to 24. Sometimes 150 
persons collected into one gang, and their success has often been im- 
mense, the murder of six persons on one occasion yielding 82,000 
rupees. 
Of the various facilities for keeping up the system, the most promi- 
nent are the practice amongst the natives of travelling before dawn, of 
the travellers mixing freely together, and taking their meals by the way- 
side instead of in villages,—in the very Bails, in short, to which they 
are inveigled by the Thug in the shape of a fellow-traveller: money- 
remittances are also usually made by disguised travellers, whose 
treasure is exposed at the custom-houses; and, worst of all, the bankers 
themselves will never own to the losses they sustain, which, as a visi- 
tation of God, would, if avenged, lead, as they think, to future and 
perhaps heavier punishment. 
Had the Thugs ever destroyed Englishmen, they would quickly 
have been put down; but practised, as the system was, invariably on 
a class of people acknowledging the finger of the Deity in its execution, 
its glaring enormities were long in rousing the attention of the Indian 
Government. 
A few examples of the activity exercised by the suppressors will 
interest you. They act wholly through the information given by 
approvers, who are simply king’s evidences. Of 600 Thugs engaged 
in the murder of 64 people, and plunder of 191,000 rupees, all except 
seventy were captured in ten years, though separated into six gangs, 
and their operations continued from 1826 to 1830: the last party 
was taken in 1836. And again, between the years 1826 and 1835, 
1562 Thugs were seized, of whom 382 were hanged, and 909 trans- 
ported; so that now it is but seldom these wretches are ever heard of. 
