Those who could establish their rights to free lands were confirmed in them; from those who failed to do so they were resumed. The saving to Government was about thirty lacs (300,000.) a year. The question had been first mooted in 1793, and additional powers were given to the English revenue officers on the subject in 1819. The measure had not, therefore, by any means originated with Lord William Bentinck; but the Act III. of 1828 brought the long-existing question to a final settlement, and all persons who failed to prove recent free tenure were allowed to retain their lands on payment of the regulated assess ment. The year 1829 was marked by one of the governor-general's most famous and most humane measures,-the abolition Abolition of of Suttee throughout India. It was a subject to which Suttee. he addressed himself with great earnestness directly he arrived in Calcutta. He applied for the opinions of military officers of experience as to the feeling of the native army on the subject; to civilians and other persons long resident in India as to those of the people at large. Here and there, as in the case of Mr. H. H. Wilson, he met with men who believed that the abolition of the rite would be attended with the highest degree of danger; and there were many also who, perpetuating the older traditions of the service, while they would fain have seen the cruel evil removed, yet lacked the nerve to make a step in advance of them, and pleaded the prescriptive right of the people to do as their forefathers had done for generations past. But Lord William Bentinck was deterred by no fears, and he had certainly no sympathy with the old service traditions. He saw no danger in India; and he was well aware that the whole of the public in England would welcome the abolition of the rite as one, perhaps the first, of England's great reforms of Hindoo abuse. On December 14, 1829, therefore, supported by Sir Charles Metcalfe and Mr. Bayley, the Act was passed, from which every governorgeneral, from Lord Cornwallis to Lord Minto, had success of shrunk with apprehensions, which they had recorded. the measure. Those implicated in the act of Suttee were now chargeable with wilful murder: those assisting at the rite with being accessaries. There were a few attempts to evade the law, but they were promptly suppressed, and the horrible rite ceased to exist. With 1830 came another deliverance from a great public danger, in the suppression of Thuggee. The word is Operations derived from the Hindee verb 'Thugna,' to cheat or against deceive; but in the sense it was used it meant the strangulation of travellers by Thugs, a fraternity which, from the earliest ages, had infested the roads of India, from the Himalayas Thuggee. to Cape Comorin, and from Guzerat to Assam. Occasionally gangs of these murderers had been apprehended; and in native States, and the Punjâb, punished by death or mutilation; but no knowledge of their peculiar association had been obtained. Discovery of One evening in 1829, as Major Sleeman, then the deputy the crime. commissioner of the Saugor district, was seated at his tent door, a man, advancing rapidly, threw himself at his feet, and begged to be allowed to make an important communication; but that Mrs. Sleeman should withdraw. He then proceeded to state that he was a leader of a gang of Thugs then not far off, and that the grove at Mundésur, in which Major Sleeman's camp was pitched, was full of corpses of travellers who had been murdered. Next day the hideous proof was given by exhumation of dead bodies where he pointed out their graves, and no time was lost in apprehending the gang to which the leader had belonged. Many of them became approvers, and by degrees circle after circle of information spread till they had covered all India. Hardly a province or district was found free from Thugs, and in their rites, proceedings, passwords and signs, there was little difference found anywhere. Proceedings The system of the Thugs was to decoy travellers, single or in bodies, to join their gangs on pretence of mutual proof the Thugs. tection; to carry them on, sometimes for days in succession, to some spot decided upon, when, at a signal given by the leader, all were strangled and buried in graves already prepared for them. Major, afterwards Sir William, Sleeman, in a most interesting and effective report, laid the information he had obtained before Government; and Lord William Bentinck did not hesitate to put in force the strongest means at his dispartments for posal for the suppression of the crime. A new depart Special de ment was forth with organised, and placed under the control of Major Sleeman, who applied all his great energy to the work, and was ably seconded. Its proceedings were extended into all native States as well as into every British province and district, and up to 1837, 3,266 persons had been apprehended and variously disposed of. The effect of these vigorous proceedings was, that every known Thug, or relation of a Thug, throughout India was apprehended; and as their numbers precluded the enforcement of severe penal measures, the least guilty were formed into a settlement, or school of industry, at Jubbulpoor, and instructed in various trades. Their descendants continue there, and carpets, tent-cloths and tents, with many other useful articles, are now manufactured with a rare skill and beauty. These artisans, as they may now be called, are, however, still kept under surveillance and it may be the suppression of the crime. Final suppression of the system. ; hoped that in the course of a few generations, their traditions may become extinct, as for the last twenty years no case of Thuggee has appeared in any part of the continent of India. with Steam communication with India is now so familiar a subject, that allusion to its early commencement appears like Steam coma dream of the past. Yet forty years ago, only for the munication exertions of Lord William Bentinck, it might have England. been indefinitely delayed. In 1830, the first steamers, built at Calcutta, and fitted with engines from England, ascended the Ganges for 800 miles, and the success of the experiment amply justified its extension. So, also, the establishment of communication with England by steam vessels was taken up at the same time, with the same ardour, by the governor-general; but he was checked by the Court of Directors on the score of expense, and their inexplicable apathy can be traced perhaps to their own exclusive policy, and a dread that India might be brought too near to England. Thus the enterprise languished for nearly twelve years; but the merit of the first attempt rests with Lord William Bentinck's administration, and in the success of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company's first endeavours lie the admirable results enjoyed by the public of India and of England in the year 1870. With the regulation for the legalisation of Malwah opium, the record of the great measures of 1830 closes. By a Opium. system of licenses, it was enabled to be brought from the dominions of native princes in Malwah, where it was extensively produced, to Bombay, and by those means the former smuggling to the coast by way of Sindh and to the Portuguese ports was effectually prevented. The quality of the drug was tested in Bombay, and, under the official seal of Government, it was exported to China, on the same basis as that of Bengal, attended with a large corresponding increase to the public revenue. CHAPTER X. THE ADMINISTRATION OF LORD WILLIAM BENTINCK (continued), 1831 To 1832. Up to the year 1831, it may be said, with truth, that the natives of India in the British provinces had been systemati- Advancecally denied all participation in the government of ment of their country. Under the pressure of public necessity, natives. a few offices had been created for the relief of the English functionaries; but the declared policy of the Government, both at home and in India, was against the measure of opening public employment to the people, on the ground that it was pregnant with danger to the existence of British authority. It therefore required no ordinary amount of resolution to break through these long existing, and, with few exceptions, persistently maintained, opinions; and, fortunately, the views of the governor-general were Native judges supported by the able and liberal members of his appointed. Council. The first reform was applied by the regulation of 1831 to the judicial department in the creation of native judges, and their primary jurisdiction over civil suits. This measure not only relieved the judicial department of a load of work which could never be completed, but it opened a way to official service which, during the last forty years, has been very materially enlarged in all departments of the administration, and in all parts of India, with singular success, and is still extending. The admission of natives of all castes and creeds, under eligible for the provisions of the enactment, included also native Christians, whose employment, under, as it were, a cruel refinement of prejudice and apprehension, had been before expressly prohibited-and they took their place with others, without prejudice. The recognition of the great principle was the first step gained and since its wisdom and necessity were established the question has never retrograded ; while the conduct of the native officials has amply justified the hope that their first real friend had formed of them. Native Christians office. In 1831, the condition of Oudh was brought under Lord William Bentinck's notice by the Resident, Mr. Maddock. The continuous history of this province shows that remonstrances against its misgovernment had been addressed by every governor-general in succession to the king; but at the present crisis local affairs were worse than ever. In order to judge for himself, the governor-general proceeded to Lukhnow, and the king was informed that the management of his country would be assumed unless reform ensued. This menace was followed by the reappointment, by the king, of the celebrated Hakeem Méndhy, as his minister, an able and fearless reformer, who effected some beneficial changes; but his honest advice was unwelcome to the king and his licentious court, and he was ultimately dismissed. The affairs of the kingdom thenceforward drifted into still greater confusion, which increased till its final extinction was determined on twenty-five years afterwards; but under the instruction of the Court of Directors, Lord William Bentinck, in 1831, was at Condition of liberty to have placed Oudh on the footing of the Carnatic, and the postponement of the measure only increased its difficulty. Mahomedan fanaticism, as if in proof that it would never be extinguished, caused an insurrection in the very vicinity Fanatical of Calcutta in 1831. A Fakeer, named Teetoo Meer, insurrection. of some local sanctity, had become a disciple of the famous Syud Ahmed of the Punjâb, and began to preach a holy war against all infidels. It was necessary, as their numbers increased, to employ force against his followers, for they burnt villages, defiled Hindoo temples, and their outrages became more daring and continuous. The insurgents were attacked and dispersed with severe loss, and the insurrection was crushed: but the fanatical sect has never been perfectly eradicated in Bengal, and several instances of sympathy with insurgents in the Punjab have since been traced to members of the Wáhábee sect, many of them holding influential positions in the country. The Kole war. The small insurrection of Teetoo Meer in the Baraset district, was followed by a much more serious rising in 1832 by the Koles of Western Bengal, an aboriginal tribe, who, like the Santáls, described by Mr. W. Hunter, in the Annals of Rural Bengal,' had, at a very early period, been driven into the hills by the Aryan settlers. By degrees they had come under the operation of laws of which they had no conception, and of systematic encroachment by Bengal settlers, and the nominal Zemindars of their provinces; and against these they rebelled, and proceeded to acts of outrage which could not at first be suppressed. Many perished in a fruitless resistance against regular troops; but eventually the whole submitted. The The tribe is regulations, unfitted, to as yet a savage people, were special then withdrawn, and their province placed under a special commissioner. The Koles since then have gradually advanced in civilisation and prosperity: and at the Conversions. present time many thousands of them have become Christians, and have established churches, where heretofore only the most debasing forms of a primitive idolatry existed. placed under jurisdiction. modifled. In his remodelling of the laws, the stringency of the Hindoo law of inheritance did not escape the governor-general's Law of perception. Under its provisions, no one who aban- inheritance doned the Hindoo faith could inherit ancestral property, since the basis of inheritance consisted in performing certain ceremonies to the memory of his progenitors. This disability was, however, quickly removed. Other reforms in civil and Otherjudicial criminal procedure were adopted; monthly jail deliveries reforms. were established; a new chief court was established in the north |