Most of the crime in respect of property was, as usual, committed by Mhar and Mang robbers from the Deccan, by the Wagris or gipsy tribes, by professional thieves and beggars from Kathiawar, and by north-country Hindus and Pathans. Bombay has a large floating population of these wanderers, who visit the city for criminal purposes, and, having attained their object, travel to other parts of India, where all trace of them is frequently lost. Among cases of special importance were the prosecutions of two licensed dealers in arms and ammunition in 1899, a “golden gang” or swindling case in which a respectable Indian firm was cheated of Rs. 63,000, and which was successfully investigated by Inspector (afterwards Superintendent) Sloane, and the conviction for sedition of the editor of a vernacular newspaper, the _Gurakhi_, which, as an organ of the revolutionary party in Western India, had indulged in violent anti-British propaganda. The effect of plague and famine conditions upon the activities of the police was apparent in the returns of recovery of stolen property; and their normal duty of watch and ward suffered also to some extent from the imposition of such emergent tasks as the registration, accommodation, feeding and repatriation of a large number of war-refugees who arrived from the Transvaal in 1899. The restrictions upon the Haj traffic continued; but this did not absolve the police from the task of “shepherding” large numbers of returning pilgrims—the backwash of former pilgrimages—or of repatriating hundreds of poor and illiterate Moslems, who, knowing nothing of the stoppage of the traffic, arrived every year in Bombay in the hope of being allowed to embark for Jeddah.