"The uniformity in the colour of hair, eyes, and complexion of the Indian races renders identification far from easy, and the difficulty of recording the description of an individual, so that he may be afterwards recognised, is very great. Again, their hand-writing, whether it be in Persian or Devanagri letters, is devoid of character and gives but little help towards identification. "The tenacity with which a native of India cleaves to his ancestral land, his innate desire to acquire more and more, and the obligation that accrues to him at birth of safeguarding that which has already been acquired, amounts to a religion, and passes the comprehension of the ordinary Western mind. This passion, or religion, coupled with a natural taste for litigation, brings annually into the Civil Courts an enormous number of suits affecting land. In a native State at one time under my political charge, the percentage of suits for the possession of land in which the title was disputed amounted to no less than 92, while in 83 per cent of these the writing by which the transfer of title purported to have been made, was repudiated by the former title-holder as fraudulent and not executed by him. When it is remembered that an enormous majority of the landholders whose titles come into court are absolutely illiterate, and that their execution of the documents is attested by a mark made by a third party, frequently, though not always apparently, interested in the transfer, it will be seen that there is a wide door open to fraud, whether by false repudiation or by criminal attempt at dispossession. "It has frequently happened in my experience that a transfer of title or possession was repudiated; the person purporting to have executed the transfer asserting that he had no knowledge of it, and never authorised any one to write, sign, or present it for registration. This was met by a categorical statement on the part of the beneficiary and of the attesting witnesses, concerning the time, date, and circumstances of the execution and registration, that demolished the simple denial of the man whom it was sought to dispossess. Without going into the ethics of falsehood among Western and Eastern peoples, it would be impossible to explain how what is repugnant to the one as downright lying, is very frequently considered as no more than venial prevarication by the other. This, however, is too large a subject for present purposes, but the fact remains that perjury is perpetrated in Indian Courts to an extent unknown in the United Kingdom.