PHANSIGARS. 
123 
CHAPTER X. 
PHANSIGARS CONTINUED, 
When we look at the depravity of the various da- 
coit gangs so common in India, we are to consider 
this, as I have already said, one of the evils of that 
defective legislation which prevails through all the 
native governments. The whole social system is ra- 
dically defective ; and where a large mass of men is 
cast from the bosom of the community into degrada- 
tion and contempt, the spirit of retaliation for wrong 
will prevail among them, and the desperate reaction 
of crime must be the natural consequence. Where 
man forces his fellow-man to become his enemy, by 
casting upon him a moral taint and shunning him 
as a moral pestilence, it is natural to expect that 
the fiercest passions of his nature, then loosed from 
the restraint of all civil ties, will rebel against the 
tyranny, and that he will put them in array against 
his oppressors. The justice of this inference is 
practically proved in India every day and every 
hour. Where there are many outcasts from society, 
there must be as many enemies ; and to those 
rigid and exclusive laws which separate men from 
each other by an impassable wall of partition, ele- 
