r of disguises to suit their purpose; and, as they prey chiefly
upon the poorer sort of travellers, they require to destroy the
greater number of lives to make up their incomes. A party of two or
three poisoners have very often succeeded in destroying another of
eight or ten travellers with whom they have journeyed for some days,
by pretending to give them a feast on the celebration of the
anniversary of some family event. Sometimes an old woman or man will
manage the thing alone, by gaining the confidence of travellers, and
getting near the cooking-pots while they go aside; or when employed
to bring the flour for the meal from the bazaar. The poison is put
into the flour or the pot, as opportunity offers.

People of all castes and callings take to this trade, some casually,
others for life, and others derive it from their parents or teachers.
They assume all manner of disguises to suit their purposes; and the
habits of cooking, eating, and sleeping on the side of the road, and
smoking with strangers of seemingly the same caste, greatly
facilitate their designs upon travellers. The small parties are
unconnected with each other, and two parties never unite in the same
cruise. The members of one party may be sometimes convicted and
punished, but their conviction is accidental, for the system which
has enabled us to put down the Thug associations cannot be applied,
with any fair prospect of success, to the suppression of these pests
to society.[16]

The Thugs went on their adventures in large gangs, and two or more
were commonly united in the course of an expedition in the
perpetration of many murders. Every man shared in the booty according
to the rank he held in the gang, or the part he took in the murders;
and the rank of every man and the part he took generally, or in any
particular murder, were generally well known to all. From among these
gangs, when arrested, we found the evidence we required for their
conviction--or the means of tracing it--among the families and
friends of their victims, or with persons to whom the property taken
had been disposed of, and in the graves to which the victims had been
consigned.

To give an idea of the system by which the Government of India has
been enabled to effect so great a good for the people as the
suppression of these associations, I will suppose that two sporting
gentlemen, A at Delhi, and B in Calcutta, had both described the
killing of a tiger in an island in the Gange