sions. People in their
fear are tempted to say that they have done a certain thing, in order
to escape from present pain. It has often been urged that confessions
made by prisoners to the Indian police should not be accepted as
evidence, and this is a reform urgently needed. The trouble to which
the police subjected our villagers will not deter them from committing
offences, but it has convinced them, from the Patel down to the
Mahars, that if in the future there is any wrongdoing in the village,
anything is preferable to invoking the aid of the police. And that is
a serious result, because in an out-of-the-way village, if the Patel
takes no action, almost any crime, even murder, could be committed,
and the fact need never be known.

It should, however, be added that the detection of wrongdoers is
beset in India with peculiar difficulties. The presence of serious
crime in a certain locality may be a sufficiently self-evident fact,
and yet it may be years before it is brought home to its real authors.
The Western rogue often betrays himself by his clumsy efforts to
escape. The Eastern wrongdoer never commits this mistake. While the
police are searching for him far and wide, he is very likely all the
time living in their midst.

In the smaller sphere of a household or school, there is a similar
difficulty in discovering the real origin of some irregularity.
Thieving may go on in a certain bungalow; all kinds of people are
suspected, almost always the wrong ones; if the police are called in,
they generally lay the guilt on one of the poorer class of servants,
who in sheer fright at being accused, and with the dread of torture in
his mind, is almost ready to say that he is guilty. Innocent servants
are sometimes thoughtlessly discharged without character, only on
suspicion. Not unfrequently, even before the excitement has subsided,
fresh thefts occur, showing that the thief is still at large. And if
he is ever found out, which is not by any means invariably the case,
the chances are that he will prove to be somebody near at hand, who
was supposed to be above suspicion.

Serious moral wrongs may go on in an Indian household quite unknown to
most of its members, and so skilfully concealed that they may have
existed for years without suspicion. Even when the matter has
ultimately come to light, the head of the household is perhaps the
last to learn what nearly everybody else knew. Many Indian schoolboys
are ready enough to