actory result. Police torture leads to
concealment of crime. Detection of crime difficult in India.
Thieving. Serious moral wrongs. Successful concealment.

In the Indian High Courts justice is administered with extreme care,
and sentences are pronounced with a full sense of responsibility and
with complete impartiality, so far as it is possible to come at the
truth where a large measure of false evidence is almost sure to have
place in every case. Indians who have been raised to important
judicial positions have shown themselves fully competent to discharge
the duties of their office rightly, and have shown much legal
sagacity, together with the other special qualifications which go to
make a good judge.

But when you descend to the petty courts, the state of things is less
satisfactory. When everything is in the hands of a lower grade of
Indian officials, and European supervision is necessarily of the
slightest, influence and money and favour and luck have much to do
with the chances for or against the prisoner. In the tracking of
culprits and the gathering of evidence, and in all the preparatory
work in which police are engaged, it is to be feared that unlawful
methods are still practised, especially in the more remote country
districts. Some of the European police do not seem to take much
trouble to stamp out these abuses.

We had an opportunity of seeing something of the ways in which Indian
police try to discover an offender, after the disappearance one night
of the clock from the village Mission day-school. We informed the
_Patel_, or headman, of our loss, which was the correct procedure. He,
at leisure, held a sort of court of inquiry in the verandah of the
Mission bungalow; but as nothing transpired he, again at leisure,
reported the matter to the city police, and two men in plain clothes
were sent to make preliminary inquiries. Not being able to ascertain
anything definite, they began to put in practise their own methods of
extracting evidence. They caned a suspected boy in order to try and
get him to confess, and also one of his companions who they supposed
might know something about it. I myself saw the marks of the cane on
the boys. The punishment would not have been excessive supposing they
had been convicted of the offence. The police were also said to have
beaten a labouring man in order to extort a confession, because there
was a rumour that the boys had given the clock to him.

The vil