by the hare-brained chatter of a seditious press. This consultation was something novel. It was a sudden omen of the future, and pregnant with things to come.
Again, though our codes are undoubtedly excellent, yet the slow course of Indian justice has become proverbial. If the Asiatic, justifiably enough after all, likes justice to be swift and cheap, we have not succeeded in supplying that article. As M. Chailley has recently observed, "outside of the Presidency towns, the procedure of the courts seems to be very complicated, slow, and costly, and unsuited for about one-third of India." Besides, English civil law is one of the most cumbrous systems in the world, and its application to India is not an unmixed success. To some extent we have thus compromised the value of a magnificent gift, and our judicial conceptions and procedure in the civil field have helped litigation to grow into a speculation, a mania, and a curse.
Or again, though our public works have saved the agricultural community from actual starvation, yet on the other hand, in the words of Sir John Strachey, the warm advocate of our policy here, "the indebtedness of the agriculturists is greater now than it was before the establishment of our government"; while in 1899 Lord Curzon stated that "the canker of agricultural indebtedness is eating into the vitals of India."
Admirable, too, as Indian finance has been on the whole, yet in its relation to the Bengal land
