He therefore consults his own interest and
his own case by leaving them to carry on their trade of robbery or
murder unmolested; and his master, the magistrate, is well pleased
not to be pestered with charges against men whom he has no chance of
getting ultimately convicted. It was in this way that so many hundred
families of assassins by profession were able for so many generations
to reside in the most cultivated and populous parts of our
territories, and extend their depredations into the remotest parts of
India, before our System of operations was brought to bear upon them
in 1830. Their profession was perfectly well known to the people of
the districts in which they resided, and to the greater part of the
police; they murdered not within their own district, and the police
of that district cared nothing about what they might do beyond
it.[22]
The most respectable native gentleman in the city and district told
me one day an amusing instance of the proceedings of a native officer
of that district, which occurred about five years ago. 'In a village
which he had purchased and let in farms, a shopkeeper was one day
superintending the cutting of some sugar-cane which he had purchased
from a cultivator as it stood.
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