Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/109

Rh Nor did Dalhousie concern himself less with the revenue and judicial system which his lieutenants established under his orders in the Punjab. Justice under the Sikhs had been a matter of bribery mingled with caprice. The old native judges regarded their petitioners in the same light in which an English barrister views his clients, as a source of honourable emolument. In the criminal administration the great Sikh ruler, Ranjít Singh, had been averse to capital punishment, and substituted for it a regular system of fines and mutilation. Imprisonment seemed to His Highness to be a clumsy and costly device for keeping criminals at the public expense. He adopted in place of it a regular gradation of maiming, from cutting off the nose as a penalty for theft, to chopping off the hands for highway robbery, and ham-stringing for burglary by night. The British Government had to organise the whole system of civil and criminal justice de novo.

In the revenue administration the task of reconstruction was even more severe. Ranjít Singh acknowledged only two instruments of government, the soldier and the tax-gatherer. In the last years of his reign he had indeed established a rude form of central audit. How rude the audit was, may be inferred from the fact that the pay-master of the Sikh forces had presented no balance-sheet during the sixteen years before the British annexation.