If the peasantry were asked, they would say there was plenty of truth
to be found everywhere except among a few scoundrels, who, to curry
favour with the Government officers, betrayed their trust, and told
the value of their neighbours' fields. In their ideas, he might as
well have gone off, and brought down the common enemy upon them in
the shape of some princely robber of the neighbourhood.
Locke says: 'Outlaws themselves keep faith and rules of justice one
with another--they practise them as rules of convenience within their
own communities; but it is impossible to conceive that they embrace
justice as a practical principle who act fairly with their fellow
highwaymen, and at the same time plunder or kill the next honest man
they meet.' (Vol. i, p. 37.) In India, the difference between the
army of a prince and the gang of a robber was, in the general
estimation of the people, only in _degree_--they were both driving an
_imperial trade_, a 'padshahi kam'. Both took the auspices, and set
out on their expedition after the Dasahra, when the autumn crops were
ripening; and both thought the Deity propitiated as soon as they
found the omens favourable;[15] one attacked palaces and capitals,
the other villages and merchants' storerooms.
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