The Registers used to have the trial of civil suits for property, if not more than five hundred rupees (£50) in value. The abolitionists urged the injustice of letting raw youths experimentalise upon small suits, to the supposed detriment of poor suitors. There was a show of reason in this mode of arguing; but those who used it did not give due weight to the consideration that these youths were to become the dispensers of justice to all classes, and that it was better for the country to suffer a little from their blunders at the outset, than to have them at last advanced to the highest posts on the judgment-seat without any judicial training whatsoever. But, in fact, the whole argument was based upon a mere assumption. The young Registers certainly committed occasional blunders, as old Justices and Aldermen, if we are to believe the daily papers, constantly commit them in England; but, on the whole, their courts were generally popular and in good repute among the natives. The young civilian had often a pride in his own little court of record, liked to know that it was well thought of, and was sometimes pleased to find parties shaping their plaints so as to bring them within the limits of his cognisance. They thus often acquired a personal regard for the people, whom it was their pride, as well as their duty, to protect—a feeling which has since, we fear, been too much weakened. The young civilians of the present day, though excellent men of business, and accomplished linguists, have seldom any individual feeling for the natives, whom they regard in a light for which no word occurs to us so happily expressive as the French term, “les administrés.” Thus it happened that the abolition of Registerships proved almost the death-blow to the Cornwallis system, and shook, not merely the framework, but the very principles of judicial administration throughout the country. It was followed up by a series of measures, all calculated to lower the judicial department of the service, and to prove to the natives that the protection of the law, promised in the still unrepealed regulations, was thenceforward to prove illusory, wherever it was required to shield them from the encroachments of any new scheme or theory finding favour for the moment with an executive government ruling avowedly upon principles of expediency, and seeking every occasion to shake off the trammels imposed upon its freedom of action by the cautious provisions of the Cornwallis code.