through which his probation had been carried on. He had laboured for nearly fifty years in active missionary life, and in the last mission had received so many converts into the Church of God. Were not these things themes for thankfulness? He had laboured too, not amongst the great, though some had joined his congregation, but amongst the poor, the natives and Portuguese. And shall we not say he was a good soldier of Jesus Christ, and bless God that in the heathenism of last century in Calcutta he gave such a witness for truth.

A portrait of Mr. Kiernander formerly existed, and was given by the Missionary to Mr. Brown, but it has been lost. An engraving of him, from a painting by Imhoff in 1772, hangs in the Mission or Old Church Rooms, and has the following inscription in German:

Not in thy cold Sweeden, no,

On Ganges' banks it is thy lot God's messenger to be.

In recording these things it has been our earnest endeavour with scrupulous exactness to shew Mr. Kiernander's work in its right light, leaving others to judge from the detail, what there is of good in the story and what of evil. We may only add, therefore, that while from his labours so decided and so useful, we claim for him in all justice the title of the first Protestant Missionary to Bengal, we must also claim for Dr. Carey and his zealous colleagues, Marshman and Ward, all the credit due to an original attempt in devising and carrying out those excellent plans which have laid so broad a foundation on which to build the native churches of this country. For while his labours precede theirs and ought not to be despised or forgotten; their efforts were independent of his and they received from him no direct help. Yet why should we speak of the praises of men. We are sure that every one of these honoured Missionaries would have been ready to ascribe all the praise and the glory to Him, by whose gracious Providence they were sustained, and by whose enriching blessing their labours were rendered productive of lasting good to their fellow-men.

A A

ART. V.-1. Report of the Superintendent of Police of the Lower Provinces for 1844-5.

2. Report of the Committee of the House of Commons, 1828-9.

FEW merchants in England have any correct or vivid idea of the system, by which Indigo in Lower Bengal is sown, cultivated and cut. Few, even amongst the residents in India, know more about a Planter's Life, than the wars and rumours of wars, which sound in their ears at uncertain intervals. In England, spite of the increasing desire for accurate knowledge on Indian matters, it would at times almost seem as if the prevalent notion of a Planter, engaged either in Sugar or Indigo cultivation, were that of a man, with a wide-brimmed straw hat, or fierce and oppressive overseer, and a whole string of unfortunate dark coloured beings, working away incessantly under a broiling and vertical sun. And in India many individuals, otherwise accurately informed on the resources of the country, know little more of a planter save that he is very often in hot water, that his name is bandied about in the Mofussil Courts as a byeword, and that he is supposed to go home at the end of a couple of lustra, with a fortune raised on the basis of oppression and illegality.

We shall not therefore endeavour in the following pages to institute any inquiry as to the prospects of Indigo, in a commercial point of view. We shall not discuss the point whether Benares turns out better produce than Tirhút: why that of Bengal is generally considered superior to either: whether up-country seed be the better for sowing: how far a railroad in the Indigo districts would be likely to engross the traffic of the circuitous, and often dangerous water route: how many "bumper seasons" in succession may be supposed to qualify a man for retirement from Indian life, or whether, within the last ten years, a greater number of fortunes have been made, or lost. But we will endeavour to give a sketch of the system pursued by Indigo planters, and of their dealings with Zemindars, Middlemen and Ryots: of the manifold temptations to which they have been exposed: of the excuses they may plead, and the degree of condemnation they must incur. We will try and give the planter fair play, nothing extenuating nor setting down ought in malice. But, as we shall be compelled to treat more of the individual when in court and embroiled in cases, than when riding over his new sown lands, with high hopes of a full crop, it has seemed best to us first to consider those peculiar features of Indian Society by which he

has been led, like Scapin, "à se brouillier avec la justice." And this leads us to examine what has been well termed "the Lattial system," as a great and striking feature in all dealings between the European settler, and the Native Zemindar. Few readers will require to be told that the word Lattial is derived from Latti, a club or stick, and will thus signify a cudgel player or club-man. Would indeed that their weapons had never been of other material than wood, and the system, though bad enough, would never have presented some of the atrocious characteristics, which have signalised its past career. The Indian statesman, and indeed every Englishman in India, may find no unprofitable lesson in remarking how, at infinite distances of time and place, and with climate and people radically distinct, corresponding phases of Society are marked by corresponding outrages against civilization and order. Laws may defeat their own object by excessive weakness, as well as by excess of severity: and however stringent may be some of the Revenue Regulations, the criminal laws of British India have as yet erred more on the side of leniency, than on that of harshness. Under the Roman constitution, and in the decline of the commonwealth, the streets of the great city were marked by exactly the same outrages, as those which have figured every year, in the report of the Superintendent of Police. Gracchus and Clodius, Decimus Brutus and Saturnius, one and all gained their own elections, or prevented that of their rivals, carried out their strange law, or hindered the good citizen from proposing his beneficial enactment, by maintaining round their persons numerous bands of hired ruffians. The Zemindar and the Planter got possession of the wished for village or estate, and reaped the tempting crop of Indigo by paying at a high rate, some two or three hundred Lattials, and taking due care moreover that the labourer should work for his hire. The causes in both cases, we must allow, are slightly different. "Because the Roman constitution provided no adequate legal punishment for enormous crimes, men became reconciled to 'irregular inflictions of vengeance on the plea of necessity," men excused the partisans of the turbulent demagogue, or the unyielding aristocrat, who had no scruples in availing themselves of retaliations, by the unlawful means their rivals had previously employed. And because in India, from thirty years back, up to the present date, or nearly so, districts were enormous, and justice far off, and its course any thing but rapid or unobstructed, and above all, because the law provided no means whereby Principals could be made amenable to punishment, and responsible for the acts of their agents, the Zemin

dar and the Planter drew out their forces in the field, and many a good stand up fight, in the broad face of day, was the result.

But no dignity of precedent, or combination of names from the pages of History, can confer lustre on the Lattial system, or wipe away a single one of its misdeeds. The example of Rome can no more justify or even palliate the Planter, than the existence of sycophancy, and false indictments at Athens, can give honour to the false cases, and the perjury of our Mofussil Courts. Unconsciously, and led perhaps by a train of circumstances almost unexampled, the Planters have lent themselves to practices paralleled certainly by those of the armed bands of the great city, and they must now bear the opprobrium without the intervention of that friendly veil, by which antiquity, to unthinking readers, divests many scenes of one half their horrors. Distance will here lend no enchantment to the view, and riots with loss of life, stand out, glaring and unredeemed, in all their naked ugliness.

We must glance at the condition of the indigo planter some thirty or forty years ago, when he first set foot in the country. He was in truth nothing more or less than an adventurer, seeking a spot on which to establish himself. The method generally pursued was for him to purchase a potta of some fifty, one hundred, or more bigahs, and there and then erect a factory with vats, godowns, and machinery complete. We must recollect that the state of the charter, until recently, prevented Europeans from holding property in their own names, and the land attached to the Factory, indeed the Factory itself, was held benami, or covertly, by the master, and openly, by his native agent or some other man of straw. Not a landholder himself, he naturally attempted to persuade the neighbouring Ryots to sow, cultivate and reap the indigo on his behalf, with a present earnest of two rupees per bigah, on anticipation of a dividend at the coming harvest. Of the advance and repayment afterwards, we shall speak presently. But it was not to be supposed that the Zemindar of those Ryots would tamely look on an interference with his droits de Seigneur, nor indeed were the cultivators generally disposed to grasp at the proffered loan. A foreigner threatening, cajoling, or persuading a population, who called him lord and master, was a loss of dignity not to be borne. With a Zemindar indignant and a number of Ryots acting under his influence, and averse to indigo naturally, there would of course be a hundred occasions of quarrel; or suppose the Zemindar an absentee, yet the Middlemen swarmed in Protean variety, of

confined, enjoyed an There is, of course,

whom each with a jurisdiction more authority more compact and effective. no doubt, abstractedly speaking, of the Planter's right to give out advances to the Ryot, and of the Ryot's, to sow and cut for the Planter, provided his so doing, were not prejudicial to the lord of the soil. But are the Choudaris of Lower Bengal, likely men to permit another to have dealings with their Ryots, and derive no actual advantage from the process themselves? Were the Planters all "honorable men" who made use of no expedients but the fairest and most equitable? and were the cultivators, if oppressed by an adventurer, to sit down quietly and not lay their complaints at the foot of their natural protector? But, besides the doubtful position in which Planter, Ryot, and Zemindar stood to each other, there were other considerations. Apart from the character, and the mutual relations of the inhabitants, let us look at the character of the soil. In a country where the alluvial nature of the ground, yearly produces considerable change in the surface, where boundaries are rare, and the sacred command to remove the few already existing, unregarded-it is sometimes hard to determine, even in a local investigation, the due limits of an estate. Again, where the hundred streams, which pour their contributions though the Sunderbunds into the ocean, are continually working such metamorphoses in their own channels, as surpass the wildest creations of fancy, and are inconceivable by those who have never witnessed them: crossing and recrossing each other, are lost and reproduced: where a river in the height of the rainy season may cover some three or four miles of country in breadth, and in the winter may dwindle down to a shallow, and yet uncertain rivulet: where the stream, remaining after the rains subside, one year skirts a village three miles at the right bank, and in the next runs at exactly the same distance off on the left: where a large slice of land, termed a chur, is worn away on the east by the current, to be reproduced some twelve months afterwards in a similar shape towards the west: where the changes take place so rapidly that they may be counted-nay heard* every day, and yet are effected by such mysterious combinations of causes, as to baffle the most practised judgment:-in such a country, is it to be wondered at, that more than one owner should come forward, for a piece of land which disappeared sometime since, and is now claimed as an old friend?

are

This is no exaggeration. We have ourselves heard the sound of banks giving way under the influence of a strong current, as distinct and prolonged as that of a roll of musketry.