Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/144

118 out to the cook. If you buy a store of sugar, of coffee, or of any thing else, you must not send it to the godown (storehouse) by the cook alone; you must go with him, and then see that nothing is abstracted while you are there; something, pretty certainly, will be, if your back is turned. Grain for the horse must be measured out to the horse-keeper in the morning, and when cooked must be measured before you to show that it is all there, and then the horse must be brought to the door and fed, that you may know that he has had his full meal. In short, you must everywhere, at all times, and with every one, be on the alert to prevent innumerable little thefts. Even servants whom you esteem most highly, and whom you would trust with large sums of money, seem to be unable to resist the universal custom of pilfering. The moral sense of the whole nation is degraded by a hundred generations of heathenism, so as almost to destroy the reproving power of conscience. Their souls are dead in trespasses and sins.

One of the customs of the country is that of taking a percentage on every thing they buy, charging each article a fraction above its actual cost. So universal is this, that they hardly