their attention less occupied, they can venture to make a more
minute scrutiny into the conduct of the people immediately around
them. The 'pipal' is occupied by one or other of the Hindoo triad,
the god of creation, preservation, or destruction, who have the
affairs of the universe to look after;[4] but the cotton and other
trees are occupied by some minor deities, who are vested with a local
superintendence over the affairs of a district, or perhaps, of a
single village.[5] These are always in the view of the people, and
every man knows that he is every moment liable to be taken to their
court, and to be made to invoke their vengeance upon himself, or
those dear to him, if he has told a falsehood in what he has stated,
or tells one in what he is about to state. Men so situated adhere
habitually, and I may say religiously, to the truth; and I have had
before me hundreds of cases in which a man's property, liberty, or
life has depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell
it to save either; as my friend told me, 'they had not learned the
value of a lie', or rather, they had not learned with how much
impunity a lie could be told in the tribunals of civilized society.
In their own tribunals, under the pipal-tree or cotton-tree,
imagination commonly did what the deities, who were supposed to
preside, had the credit of doing; if the deponent told a lie, he
believed that the deity who sat on the sylvan throne above him, and
searched the heart of man, must know it; and from that moment he knew
no rest--he was always in dread of his vengeance; if any accident
happened to him, or to those dear to him, it was attributed to this
offended deity; and if no accident happened, some evil was brought
about by his own disordered imagination.[6]

In the tribunals we introduce among them, such people soon find that
the judges who preside can seldom search deeply into the hearts of
men, or clearly distinguish truth from falsehood in the declarations
of deponents; and when they can distinguish it, it is seldom that
they can secure their conviction for perjury. They generally learn
very soon that these judges, instead of being, like the judges of
their own woods and wilds, the only beings who can search the hearts
of men, and punish them for falsehood, are frequently the persons, of
all others, most blind to the real state of the deponent's mind, and
the degree of truth and falsehood in his narrative; that, however
well-intent