administration of justice. The number of convicts confined at the six stations of this division (independent of Zillah twenty-four pergunnahs) is about 4000. Of them probably nine-tenths are decoits. Besides these, some hundreds of late years have been transported. The number of persons convicted of decoity, however great it may appear, is certainly small in proportion to those who are guilty of the crime. At Midnapore I find, by the reports of the police darogars, that in the year 1802, a period of peace and tranquillity, they sent intelligence of no less than ninety-three robberies, most of them, as usual, committed by large gangs. With respect to fifty-one of these robberies, not a man was taken, and for the remaining forty-two, very few, frequently only one or two in each gang." Other judges describe the extent to which decoity existed, as being much vaster than was generally known, and calculated to excite the most general terror throughout the country.
This is an awful picture of a people approaching to one hundred millions, and of a great and splendid country, which has been for the most part in our hands for more than a century. It only remains now to inquire what has been done since the opening of the nineteenth century for the instruction and general amelioration of the condition of this vast multitude of human beings, and thereby for our own justification as a Christian nation. Warren Hastings said most truly, that throwing aside all pretences of any other kind that many were disposed to set up, the simple truth was that "by the sword India had been acquired, and by the sword it must be maintained." If the forcible conquest of a country be, therefore, a crime
