The police were thus faced with an abnormal volume of crime resulting from disease, starvation and unemployment. In 1899 two real dacoities of the type common in up-country districts, perpetrated probably by Pardesis from Northern India, occurred in the suburbs and obliged the Commissioner to establish night-patrols of mounted and foot police in the north of the Island. The following year witnessed a marked increase of crime against property, resulting from high prices and unemployment. Famine-conditions were responsible for an abnormal number of cases of exposure of infants in 1899 and for many instances of robbery by means of _dhatura_ poisoning in 1900. But, apart from these temporary symptoms of economic disorder, the last decade of the nineteenth century witnessed a steady increase of cases of all kinds under the Indian Penal Code and miscellaneous laws. Cases under the Police Act would probably have shown a similar upward tendency, but for the fact that prosecutions were purposely avoided, in deference to the reluctance of the Presidency Magistrates to convict offenders on the sole evidence of police witnesses. It has always been difficult to find private persons willing to appear in court and give evidence in such matters. As in most parts of India, the number of false complaints brought to the police was considerable, many of these cases falling within the category of “maliciously false”. The Commissioner estimated the proportion of false to true cases in 1900 at one in 375. The false complaint, supported by false evidence, has been a feature of the criminal administration of India from early days and adequately explains the reason why Europeans have always clung so strenuously to the right, secured to them by the criminal law, of being tried by a jury containing a majority of their own countrymen. It is the only safeguard they possess against false prosecution and illegal conviction. Some such protection for the European minority is essential in a country, where the administration of justice by Indian courts has not reached so high and detached a level as it has in England.