Page:Lord Amherst and the British Advance Eastwards to Burma.djvu/54

 pleasing, let us at least acknowledge that they were clearly foreseen by many who were enthusiastic in promoting the means, and no one who turns from the most insensate ravings of the most disreputable of the vernacular prints of to-day would care to exchange India as we know it with the India depicted for us in the writings of those who knew it seventy years ago.

Of 'Thuggee and Dacoitee' we read, much in the correspondence of the period. That strange fraternity which made murder a trade and a cult had found the wild disorder of Maratha days propitious to their calling, and the formation of robber bands for the sack and plunder of defenceless villages was almost a natural sequel to the overthrow of the predatory powers. The Pindárí, as a Pindárí, found his occupation gone; but when he got back to his village he had still the acquired distaste for ordered industry and the instinct of criminal adventure. Dacoitee indeed is a spontaneous product of the Indian soil, when the powers of supreme husbandry are enfeebled. In addition to the disbanded privates of the robber army, there were also thrown loose upon society their captains, and the swaggering bully with a swarm of armed retainers at his heels was a fairly familiar figure to English travellers. Native territory and the outskirts of native courts were peculiarly their happy hunting-ground.

Nothing is more misleading than the tendency to speak of India as a uniform whole, and we pass gladly