lay in the removal of the causes which appeared to lead
to its commission, and especially in the prevention of extravagant
expenditure on marriages; but although these benevolent efforts were
undoubtedly useful, their practical results were not great, and it
gradually became clear that it was only by a stringent and organised
system of coercion that these practices would ever be eradicated. In
1870 an act of the legislature was passed which enabled the Government
to deal with the subject. A system of registration of births and deaths
among the suspected classes was established, with constant inspection
and enumeration of children; special police-officers were entertained
at the cost of the guilty communities, and no efforts were spared to
convince them that the Government had firmly resolved that it would put
down these practices, and would treat the people who followed them as
murderers. Although the time is, I fear, distant when preventive
measures will cease to be necessary, much progress has been made, and
there are now thousands of girls where formerly there were none. In the
Mainpuri district, where, as I have said, there was not many years ago
hardly a single Chauhan girl, nearly half of the Chauhan children at
the present time are girls; and it is hoped that three-fourths of the
villages have abandoned the practice."[32]

[32] _India_ by Sir John Strachey, pp. 292-3.

These facts speak for themselves and afford an incontestable proof of
the value of punishment as a remedial measure when other remedies have
failed.[33] In the re-action which is now in full force, and rightly
so, against the excessive punishments of past times, there is a marked
tendency among some minds to go to the opposite extreme, and an
attempt is being made to show that imprisonment has hardly any
curative effect at all. Its evils, and from the very nature of things
they are not a few, are almost exclusively elaborated and dwelt upon,
little attention being paid to the vast amount of good which
imprisonment alone is able to effect. It is possible that imprisonment
sends a few to utter perdition at a quicker pace than they would have
gone of their own accord, but on the other hand, it rescues many a man
before he has irrevocably committed himself to a life of crime. If it
fails the first time, it very often succeeds after the second or the
third, and no one is justified in saying imprisonment is worthless as
a reformative agency till it