personal concern with the facts, and is interested only in the symmetrical appearance of the figures exhibited in his tabular statements. A conventional explanation of the discrepancy has therefore to be found in an alleged concealment of offences. There is, however, no good reason for supposing that the people are more unwilling here than elsewhere to invoke the assistance of the Police for the recovery of stolen property, or the redress of any real injury. A murder or a burglary can scarcely be committed without attracting attention, and if in the case of petty disputes there is a reluctance to waste time and money by coming into court about them, such a habit of mind is rather to be encouraged than condemned.[1]
Another matter in which the district falls short of official requirements is the consumption of spirituous liquor. Temperance is a virtue, in which the excise authorities are by no means ready to believe. If the revenue is not up to the ordinary standard, the only explanation of the fact that they will accept is smuggling. But in spite of exceptional vigilance, an evasion of the law is very rarely detected, and probably is rarely practised. The absence of drunkenness and the absence of crime go together and explain each other. If a tempting array of bottles were displayed at selected spots along the most frequented thoroughfares, many a dusty pedestrian might be induced to assuage his thirst with a draught, and so acquire a taste which would eventually be beneficial to the excise revenue. A similar result might follow from an increase of the number of drinking-shops in the towns and large villages, to serve as social clubs for the dissolute; but the advantage to the respectable community may be doubted, while the gain to Government would be more than counterbalanced by the charges of extra police and increased jail accommodation.
- ↑ It is satisfactory to observe that the altered condition of things has at last been recognized. Mr. Webster, the Inspector-General of Police, who was Magistrate of Bulandshahr from 1863 to 1866, writes as follows in his review of the year 1882:—"The circumstances of the people have changed greatly. They are far more prosperous than they were; cultivation has greatly extended, and large tracts which were grass jungles when I knew the district, and which harboured cattle-stealers and their booty, are now well-cultivated corn-lands; and what is more important as regards the cessation of crime, the very persons who used these lands as asylums in their thieving forages are now the cultivators of them. The Gújars, who used to commit at least a third of all the crime in the district, are now to a certain extent reformed, and only occasionally vary their agricultural pursuits by an expedition for the purposes of cattle or other theft."
