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We raised the character of the rights, but cut off the 

 entail without the consent of the heirs. 



At first this did no great harm. Nobody understood 

 the change, our people then were no lawyers, courts 

 were few, and administered simple justice according 

 to equity and good conscience, and the majority of 

 civil disputes continued to be settled by the people 

 amongst themselves in the old fashion. 



But as times passed on new and new laws were con- 

 tinually made, and courts were multiplied and gra- 

 dually modified into courts of law, where justice sat 

 fettered by codes, and whence equity and good con- 

 science had been banished for contempt of court, and 

 a swarm of professional pleaders (good and bad, but 

 specially the latter) spread over the length and breadth 

 of the land, and village verdicts ceased to carry weight, 

 and in the simplest matter, which formerly would have 

 been settled on his own village platform by his own 

 brethren and elders, and rightly settled in an hour, a 

 man now had to put up with wrong, or walk twenty 

 miles to court, and fee pleaders, and waste a week or 

 more, and many weeks' earnings, and all as often as 

 not merely to see the wrong triumph. Or, if suc- 

 cessful, to be dragged yet another fifty miles, on appeal 

 to a higher court, where there were even more ex- 

 pensive pleaders to fee, and more time and money to 

 waste, dangling about the court-house steps or com- 

 pound, dogged by peons and emissaries of the under- 

 paid native subordinate ofi&cials, all threatening loss of 

 his case, unless he bribed, bribed, bribed. And if he, 

 — fortunatus nimium, — gained his case here too, and 

 prepared to start for his neglected fields, a half-ruined 



