PHANSIGARS. 
131 
tural and lawful prey. They further maintain that 
those persons whom they strangle were predestined to 
be murdered., and that therefore they only fulfil the 
irrevocable decree of destiny in putting them to death. 
It is their professed belief that they are as surely des- 
tined to become Phansigars as their victims were to 
be killed, and consequently express surprise when 
they hear themselves traduced as murderers. They 
are all fatalists, and imagine themselves to be ac- 
tuated in whatever they do by an invincible neces- 
sity; we shall therefore be the less surprised that 
compunction is a stranger to their bosoms. 
However great the sufferings of those unfortunate 
beings who happen to fall into their hands, they be- 
hold them with indomitable indifference, and fre- 
quently make their writhings the subject of their 
coarse and brutal jests. Although such a state of har- 
dened insensibility may appear, upon a superficial 
view, justly to challenge our detestation, nevertheless, 
in spite of the horror with which a contemplation of 
their enormities must naturally fill our bosoms, the 
calm and philosophic Christian will readily perceive 
that in their condition there is in truth far more cause 
for the exercise of pity than for that of any severer 
feeling. They are the wretched creatures of stern and 
debasing circumstance ; they are the moral victims of 
a system of social legislation subversive of all civil 
union, except among parts and parcels of the com- 
munity. 
It is to be remembered that they have never tasted 
the fruits of virtue. They have been reared in an at- 
mosphere of vice, where nothing but pollution could 
