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302 his indomitable energy and inflexible determination in persevering in them when once adopted.

In corroboration of this statement we may very briefly advert to two or three of the leading acts of his official life:—

On entering on his Indian Government, one of the first subjects which arrested and engaged his attention was the atrocious rite of Sati, or that of burning widows alive. His own benevolent disposition strongly prompted him to seek for the means of its total abolition, while his sagacity led him to perceive, and his honest candour to acknowledge, that the subject was beset with difficulties of a very peculiar difficulties,—difficulties which had their root deep in the most stubborn and intractable of all soils—that of hereditary superstition and religious fanaticism. His first step, therefore, was to institute inquiry and invite information from all, whether Native or European, who were in any way willing or competent to bestow it. The progress of these multiplied inquiries he watched with a tremulous solicitude for the result, which those who knew him not would be loath to credit. Having at last made up his own mind, not merely as to the moral expediency, but as to the legislative practicability and political safety of the measure, he promulgated his celebrated prohibitory decree, amid a tempest of warnings, protests, and denunciations, on the part alike of bigoted natives and still more senselessly bigoted European officials, which might have well made any Ruler of less nerve and resolution of purpose to pause, or even abandon altogether the project in blank despair.

At an early period of his administration, his attention was specially directed towards the terrible fraternity of Thugs, whose fatal presence had for ages been everywhere mysteriously felt, though everywhere shrouded under the disguise of a companionable, hearty, peaceful citizenship;—the Thugs, or those bands of leagued felons, whose very profession is that of rapine and murder, and the bonds of whose confederacy are forged out of inviolable oaths and propitiatory offerings at the shrine of a sanguinary deity. With the keen insight of practical intuition, he perceived that forms of justice, which, in the case of a people civilized in their habits and regardful of truth, were mainly designed to throw the shield of protection over innocence, could only, in the case of such outlaws and desperadoes as the Thugs, serve the purpose of so many breached walls or shattered network for the sure escape of the guilty. His resolution, therefore, was promptly taken. The grand object aimed at, viz., the detection and suppression of the monstrous system of Thuggee, was an extraordinary one, and the means to be employed in compassing that end, if intended to be effective, must be extra-