it is difficult to repress the burning indignation of one’s spirit. What shame, what disgrace, that under the laws of England, and in a country to which we owe so much wealth and power, such a system of reckless and desperate injustice should for a long series of years have been practising! But if it be difficult to read of it without curses and imprecations, what must it have been to bear? How must the wretched, hopeless, harassed, persecuted, and outraged people have called on Brahma for that tenth Avatar which should sweep their invincible, their iron-handed and iron-hearted oppressors, as a swarm of locusts from their fair land! Let any one imagine what must be the state of confusion when the zemindars, or higher collectors of the revenues were thus plagued in the sphere of their arduous duties, and called out of it, to the distant capital. When they were degraded in the eyes, and removed from the presence of the ryots, what must have been the natural consequence, but neglect and license on the part of the ryot, only too happy to obtain a little temporary ease? But the ryots themselves did not escape, as we have already seen. Such, however, continued this dismal state of things to the very end of the century. Lord Cornwallis complained in 1790, “that excepting the class of shroffs and banyans, who reside almost entirely in great towns, the inhabitants of these provinces were hastily advancing to a general state of poverty and wretchedness.” Lord Cornwallis projected _his_ plans, and in 1802, Sir Henry Strachey, in answer to interrogatories sent to the Indian judges, drew a gloomy picture of the result of all the schemes of finance and judicature that had been adopted. He represented that the zemindars, by the sale of their lands, in default of the payment of their stipulated revenue, were almost universally destroyed, or were reduced to the condition of the lowest ryots. That, in one year (1796) nearly one tenth of all the lands in Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, had been advertised for sale. That in two years alone, of the trial of the English courts, the accumulated causes threatened to arrest the course of justice: in one single district of Burdwan more than thirty thousand suits were before the judge; and that no candidate for justice could expect it in the course of an ordinary life. “The great men, formerly,” said Sir Henry, “were the Mussulman rulers, whose places we have taken, and the Hindoo zemindars. These two classes are now ruined and destroyed.” He adds, “exaction of revenue is now, I presume, and, perhaps, always was, the most prevailing crime throughout the country; and I know not how it is that extortioners appear to us in any other light than that of the worst and most pernicious species of robbers.” He tells us that the lands of the Mahrattas in the neighbourhood of his district, Midnapore, were more prosperous than ours, though they were without regular courts of justice, or police.