fluence. This is the way that all our leaders get
released, and hardly any but useless men are left in confinement." [52]

7. Pride in their profession.

It may be noticed that these robbers took the utmost pleasure in their
calling, and were most averse to the idea of giving it up and taking
to honest pursuits. "Some of the men with me," one magistrate wrote,
[53] "have been in jail for twenty, and one man for thirty years,
and still do not appear to have any idea of abandoning their illegal
vocation; even now, indeed, they look on what we consider an honest
means of livelihood with the most marked contempt; and in relating
their excursions talk of them with the greatest pleasure, much in
the way an eager sportsman describes a boar-chase or fox-hunt. While
talking of their excursions, which were to me really very interesting,
their eyes gleamed with pleasure; and beating their hands on their
foreheads and breasts and muttering some ejaculation they bewailed
the hardness of their lot, which now ensured their never again being
able to participate in such a joyous occupation." Another Badhak,
on being examined, said he could not recall a case of one of the
community having ever given up the trade of dacoity. "None ever did,
I am certain of it," he continued. [54] "After having been arrested,
on our release we frequently take lands, to make it appear we have
left off dacoity, but we never do so in reality; it is only done as
a feint and to enable our zamindars (landowners) to screen us." They
sometimes paid rent for their land at the rate of thirty rupees
an acre, in return for the countenance and protection afforded by
the zamindars. "Our profession," another Badhak remarked, [55] "has
been a _Padshahi Kam_ (a king's trade); we have attacked and seized
boldly the thousands and hundreds of thousands that we have freely
and nobly spent; we have been all our lives wallowing in wealth and
basking in freedom, and find it hard to manage with the few copper
pice a day we get from you." At the time when captures were numerous,
and the idea was entertained of inducing the dacoits to settle in
villages and supporting them until they had been trained to labour,
several of them, on being asked how much they would require to support
themselves, replied that they could not manage on less than two rupees
a day, having earned quite that sum by dacoity. This amount would be
more than twenty times the wages of an ordinary labourer a