Page:Bulandshahr- Or, Sketches of an Indian District- Social, Historical and Architectural.djvu/18

 himself the true bourgeois fear of spending a Rupee on anything that is not undeniably useful. In any case, it must be more to the public advantage that a wealthy citizen should be open handed, even from an imperfect motive, than that he should stifle a generous impulse and keep his money to himself from an over righteous repugnance to ostentation. The desire of being honoured for honourable deeds is not one of the most despicable springs of human action. To perform meritorious public services and to disclaim all reward for them would be a note of higher perfection; but such altruism is superhuman; with the purest and most virtuous of men motives are always more or less mixed.

Again, it is said that the native gentry are mostly in debt and that it is wrong to encourage them to further extravagance, even if it be in well doing. But such criticism does not apply to Bulandshahr, where the landed gentry are a very wealthy class, and I doubt if it has much force anywhere. It is not public benevolence, but long-protracted litigation in the civil Courts which involves them in financial difficulties. Thus, for example, the owner of one of the largest estates in the district, Ráo Umrás Siṅh of Kachesar, has given Rs. 4,500 for the erection of the handsome gate to the new public garden at Bulandshahr. This is an outlay which he will never feel and yet his name will be honourably commemorated by it on the spot, it may be for centuries. On the other hand, he has been forced into spending as much as Rs. 40,000 on barristers and pleaders, to the benefit of no other person whatever, in defending himself against a preposterous claim to a large portion of his property, which was brought against him by a low Muhammadan attorney, himself a worthy product of our highly civilized judicial system.

The suit was instituted on the 5th of August 1880, and was dismissed by the subordinate Judge as "false and fictitious and based on documents that were wholly or in part forged or fabricated." An appeal was laid in the High Court, and there, after full consideration, final judgment