Of the survival of torture in India as a judicial process, secret and unavowed, but undoubtedly practised, there can be no doubt. It was the subject of constant regret to conscientious English officials, who were yet unable entirely to check it. Cases of cruel maltreatment were continually brought to light, and met with exemplary punishment. Thus in 1855 a _darogah_ and his men were convicted in the Court of the "Twenty-four Pergunnahs" of having tortured a man into confession by tying his hands behind him and then hoisting him by his wrists to a beam in the roof. Another case consisted in tying a prisoner's hands and feet together and introducing a stick below the knees, after which the police, holding each end of the stick, dashed him violently against the door. As late as 1866, after the introduction of the new system, an inspector and sub-inspector trussed up four recalcitrant prisoners upon the roof of a house and left them there to starve. In the same year another sub-inspector was transported for life for having caused the death of a suspected thief by ill-usage. In this case the victim was stripped on a cold February night, whipped, then water was poured upon his naked body, and a fan was used to keep down the temperature. Again, in the same year, a high official, Colonel Pughe, reports twelve cases in which the police were accused of torturing prisoners, and out of the twelve cases seven convictions were secured. He relates in the same document that soon after the establishment of the new police, a sub-inspector of the old school ordered a man to be tied up and flogged to extort confession from him, and this in open day in the middle of a large bazaar in the Hooghly district! "So little was the occurrence thought of," writes Colonel Pughe, "that no complaint was made by the sufferer, and it was by the merest accident that the circumstance came to notice." The custom till then was apparently too common to attract attention. The people of Bengal had become accustomed to be flogged, just as the fakir grew so fond of his bed studded with pointed nails that he could not sleep comfortably on any other. As late as 1870 the editor of a respectable periodical in Bengal expressed his belief that the flogging of supposed delinquents had been so long practised with impunity that the natives took it as a matter of course. [Illustration: INDIAN POLICE AND THEIR METHODS (p. 316).]