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passage from that celebrated periodical, the Calcutta Review :-" It would be useless to point out, in this age of enlightenment, the defects of the Mahomedan law. Few people require to be told that it is a century behind the times, and that, however useful it might have been in barbarous ages, it is impotent and weak in days of refinement, and among a community daily advancing in opulence, power, and civilization. Indeed, a law to which the punishment of mutilation is familiar, and which lets off murderers, if the weapon of destruction be below the standard weight, for murderer's weapons as prescribed in the Koran, hardly requires any comment; it speaks for itself."

Here a writer of vast experience is of opinion, that the Mahomedan law, as modified by the Company's regulations, is inadequate to the wants of the native community. How much less adapted it is to those of Englishmen, let our own fellowcountrymen imagine !

As grave charges are here preferred against the whole system of Indian legislation, it becomes our duty to substantiate them. We will, therefore, point out its most glaring absurdities. In case of an appeal from an inferior to superior Court, the latter does not summon the plaintiff, defendant, and witnesses before it, but merely rests its judgment upon the papers sent up from the lesser tribunal. There is no searching cross-examination; but the Judge draws his inferences as to the

merits of the case from the colouring given by the writer of the report, who is a native. Then, this native writer frequently erases important passages, and adds words affecting the sense of sentences, in order to obtain a reversal of the verdict. For such service as this he receives ample remuneration from the party concerned. There is nothing from which native subordinates will shrink, when an opportunity offers of making money. It sometimes happens that the native writers employ these disgraceful artifices to gratify a vindictive feeling against the magistrate himself. The insolent knave chuckles in his sleeve when an order arrives reversing a decree, and reflecting on the magistrate for his stupidity.

Such a system of appeal thwarts the end of all law; it produces uncertainty. The perpetrator of a crime knows that escape from the hands of justice, even if he should fall into the clutch of its myrmidons, is a probable contingency. And thus distrust and discontent are diffused through all classes of the community. Judicial murders, unjust transportation, and the escape of the guilty, must be frequent under such corrupt legislation. Yes; so suspicious are some enlightened, honest Judges of the fidelity and accuracy of the records placed before them, that they will never deliver sentence of death, from fear of punishing innoWhat greater proof of the inefficiency of the Company's mode of dispensing justice can be

cence.

Here are Judges

adduced than this? Here are Judges compelled to come to a decision on the merits of a question involving the life, property, and liberty of another, with no other guide than a record sent up from a lesser Court, prepared by a native, and which, in all probability, is a garbled, false statement. Who, endowed with a conscience, would like to play the judge under such circumstances? If the appeals of British-born subjects are to be submitted in this way to higher authority, God preserve us! The horrors of Siberia and the knout bear no comparison to such atrocities.

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Just imagine the degradation of a good Christian, a native of York or Chester, a respectable planter, standing on his trial before a native magistrate, a Moslem dog! It must be remembered there is now no office from which natives may be excluded, provided they possess the necessary qualifications. Imagine this Englishman, we say, accused by his native cook or sweeper, of intoxication or assault, and taken before this Mahomedan official. Imagine, we say, this native magistrate committing him to prison for months, or inflicting stripes upon him. him. We do not treat of impossibilities. A deputy magistrate possesses these powers, and now that Englishmen and natives are on a level in the eye of the law, the one is as liable to be punished as the other. Intoxication is a very great crime in Mahomedan law, so is killing a man with a weapon above a certain weight. Is

there not some stipulation with the Court of Turkey, that an Englishman is not to be tried by Mahomedan forms and laws, in that country? Has not this stipulation been long in existence? On what ground did the English Government of that day make such a demand? No doubt they urged as a reason the strange discrepancy between the Mahomedan and their own system; but were in reality influenced by the conviction, that the trial of an Englishman before an infidel Court would be a national disgrace. They were powerful enough to claim such a privilege, and they did so. The members of this Government, with their English feelings, were worthy of public admiration. On one side, behold English Ministers demanding an unusual concession from a foreign Court (because they could not reconcile to their ideas of propriety a Christian degraded to the standard of Mahomedan law), we say an unusual concession, because in other countries a foreigner offending against the laws of the place where he resides, is amenable to those laws; on the other side, the Government of India,-a body of Englishmen of good education, depriving their fellowcountrymen of their constitutional privileges, of that Palladium of British liberty, Trial by Jury, blessings conferred on them by the English Parliament, of which they had been in the enjoyment a hundred and fifty years, and subjecting them, without any reason, to the dogmas of that highly moral book, the Koran.

If a future mail should bring intelligence, that Sir John Littler had assumed the turban, that Sir Fredrick Currie had wrapped his unwieldy carcase in a chupkin or native toga, and that Mr. Drinkwater Bethune had made a solemn recantation of Christianity, and been heard exclaiming, "There is no God but God, and Mahomet is his Prophet," if all this should take place, and much more, we should not be surprised. That Indian sun does so distort the imagination!

To expose all the abuses of the system, would require Herculean labour, the exposure of a few must suffice. It is a practice of this law to keep men in confinement, for fear they should commit offences, on the most vague suspicions. If a convict should be released, the term of his imprisonment having expired, and should return to his native village, the police officer there is empowered to place him in the village prison, on pretence of preventing his breaking the peace again; or, if a robbery take place, the discharged convict is frequently arrested, without an iota of evidence against him, is imprisoned on suspicion, the suspicion resting on the fact that he had once been a dishonest man. An unfortunate wretch may thus remain in the clutches of the Company's police all his life. That this practice is liable to great abuse, must appear at first sight. What a powerful instrument of extortion! What benighted regions those must be, where neither liberty, property, nor life, is safe for an hour,

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