This is no exaggeration.  It is the every day practice of the police.  They exercise a real despotism.  They have set up a reign of terror.  The nature of the ryot is such, that he will submit to a great deal to avoid having to leave his home and his work.  The police take full advantage of this feeling, and being perfectly unscrupulous, insatiably rapacious, and leagued together in villany, they make a golden harvest out of every case put into their hands.  They have made the name of justice stink in the nostrils of the respectable and well-to-do middle classes of India.

The District Superintendents are men of energy and probity, but after all they are only mortal.  What with accounts, inspections, reports, forms, and innumerable writings, they cannot exercise a constant vigilance and personal supervision over every part of their district.  A district may comprise many hundred villages, thousands of inhabitants, and leagues of intricate and densely peopled country.  The mere physical exertion of riding over his district would be too much for any man in about a week.  The subordinate police are all interested in keeping up the present system of extortion, and the inspectors and sub-inspectors, who wink at malpractices, come in for their share of the spoil.  There is little combination among the peasantry.  Each selfishly tries to save his own skin, and they know that if any one individual were to complain, or to dare to resist, he would have to bear the brunt of the battle alone.  None of his neighbours would stir a finger to back him; he is too timid and too much in awe of the official European, and constitutionally too averse to resistance, to do aught but suffer in silence.  No doubt he feels his wrongs most keenly, and a sullen feeling of hate and wrong is being garnered up, which may produce results disastrous for the peace and wellbeing of our empire in the East.

As a case in point, I may mention one instance out of many which came under my own observation.  I had a moonshee, or accountant, in one of my outworks in Purneah.  Formerly, when the police had come through the factory, he had been in the habit of giving them a present and some food.  Under my strict orders, however, that no policemen were to be allowed near the place unless they came on business, he had discontinued paying his black mail.  This was too glaring an infringement of what they considered their vested rights to be passed over in silence.  Example might spread.  My man must be made an example of.  I had a case in the Court of the Deputy Magistrate some twenty miles or so from the factory.  The moonshee had been named as a witness to prove the writing of some papers filed in the suit.  They got a citation for him to appear, a mere summons for his attendance as a witness.  Armed with this, they appeared at the factory two or three days before the date fixed on for hearing the cause.  I had just ridden in from Purneah, tired, hot, and dusty,