are the infliction of degradation and mental suffering by breaking caste, and by exposing the victims to various indignities. Police action in India is often complicated, impeded, and even neutralised by the peculiar conditions of the country, where long prevailing, more or less ineradicable custom is supreme. The average native does not pause to balance right or wrong; he likes to do just as his forefathers did through the centuries, and fails to see why an act honoured by long prescription should be called wrong-doing. Offences that the present rulers of India have put down with a strong hand, such as suttee (widow burning), leper burying, and suicide, the natives are still reluctant to call crimes. Thuggee, the cowardly murder and robbery of inoffensive and unsuspicious travellers, was part of its perpetrators' religion; theft is to thousands a sport or a profession, a habit or family tradition inherited from ancestors who were all gang-robbers. While thus tradition and custom continue to make even serious crime appear venial to the ordinary intelligence, the investigation is continually hampered, and the actual fact often concealed. Many natives, as I have said, detest police proceedings, afraid of their being unduly prolonged, of their wasting time, of their imposing the inconvenient presence of officers charged with the inquiry. Others forbear to speak, either fearing the enmity of the friends or neighbours they may implicate or with a mistaken tenderness for their honour. Yet again, timidity, venality, or stupidity has led to concealment. Witnesses whose testimony was damaging have often been bought off, having been found ready to perjure themselves for quite small sums. [Illustration: MADRAS POLICEMAN.] The police themselves have been known to hush up crimes, having been bribed to silence, and it has been discovered later that some mysterious murder had been no secret to them from the first. They have been known on sufficient payment to transport a victim's corpse to another jurisdiction, so that they might evade all responsibility for its presence. Suspicion of foul play was once aroused (it was in the old days) by the fact that certain persons who had but just dug a well for the irrigation of their fields had, for no plausible reason, filled it up again. Police officers were ordered to reopen the well, and they reported that they had done so, finding nothing wrong. But the magistrate of the district heard presently that a woman had been seen in the neighbourhood of the well just about the time it had been filled up, and that she had disappeared. Rumour said she had been murdered for the sake of some golden ornaments which she wore. The well was now dug out under the official's own eye, and it was clear that a female corpse had been buried within; a quantity of long hair was found, but the body had been removed, probably by the police.