of India. People who have
been accustomed from time immemorial to pick up sticks and graze their
cattle on forest lands, cannot understand why they should now be
forbidden to do so, nor can they realize the necessity for preserving
the trees from the chance of being destroyed by fire, a risk to which
they were frequently exposed from the Native custom of making use of
their shelter while cooking, and of burning the undergrowth to enrich
the grazing.

The action taken by the Government in sanitary matters has also
aroused much ill-feeling and apprehension. Sanitary precautions are
entirely ignored in eastern countries. The great majority of the
people can see no good in them, and no harm in using the same tank
for drinking purposes and for bathing and washing their clothes. The
immediate surroundings of their towns and villages are most offensive,
being used as the general receptacles for dead animals and all kinds
of filth. Cholera, fever, and other diseases, which carry off hundreds
of thousands every year, are looked upon as the visitation of God,
from which it is impossible, even were it not impious to try, to
escape; and the precautionary measures insisted upon by us in our
cantonments, and at the fairs and places of pilgrimage, are viewed
with aversion and indignation. Only those who have witnessed the
personal discomfort and fatigue to which Natives of all ages and both
sexes willingly submit in their struggle to reach some holy shrine on
the occasion of a religious festival, while dragging their weary limbs
for many hundreds of miles along a hot, dusty road, or being huddled
for hours together in a crammed and stifling railway carriage, can
have any idea of the bitter disappointment to the pilgrims caused
by their being ordered to disperse when cholera breaks out at such
gatherings, without being given the opportunity of performing their
vows or bathing in the sacred waters.[1]

Further, our legislative system is based on western ideas, its object
being to mete out equal justice to the rich and poor, to the Prince
and peasant. But our methods of procedure do not commend themselves
to the Indian peoples. Eastern races are accustomed to a paternal
despotism, and they conceive it to be the proper function of the local
representatives of the supreme Power to investigate and determine on
the spot the various criminal and civil cases which come under the
cognizance of the district officials. Legal technicalities and