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 struggling for a subsistence. I confess this does not accord with my experience, and I speak from observations made from Singapore to the Kybur Pass. I feel assured that those who have lived under purely native rule,bless the day when they came under the dominion of the Company, and that those still living under independent native potentates would had the annexation of their country as a boon. In no country is the public peace more seldom broken; is private property more secure; do the population enjoy the ordinary comforts of life, at less toil and trouble, or enjoy more civil and religious liberty; and if exceptions do take place, they are owing to the perversion of the law, by the natives themselves. A great outcry has of late arisen about the prevalence of torture, more particularly in the Madras presidency, as if that were the usual system of squeezing the revenue out of defaulters. During the whole of my service,and I have been more or less intimately connected with the Civil Courts, I do not remember a single case of torture inflicted, directly or indirectly, either by European or subordinate native authority.

10. MARCH OF INTELLECT.—The march of intellect is making rapid inroads into the ignorance, the apathy, and the time-honoured encumbrances that for so many centuries have obstructed the improvement of society. The improved mode of transport by steam boats has monopolized the commerce of