BRAHMAN OFFICIALS. BY ANDREW T. SIBBALD. THE Madras Province is a country of considerable extent, inhabited by some thirty and odd millions of people. Of these, rather more than one million are Brahmans, vho appear to be descendants of Arya ref ugees from North India, who immigrated into South India many centuries back, and the rest belong to hundreds of savage tribes, castes, and families whose origin is as yet unknown, and whose common characteristic is absolute inability to coalesce and form a body resembling a nation. Between the Brah mans and the people proper there is next to no intercourse; and it may be said without exaggeration that for practical purposes the Brahmans are strangers in the land as fully as are the English who sojourn there. They live apart in their own villages; they will not intermarry with, or drink water offered by, an ordinary Indian; and their undisguised contempt for the blacks who are not Brah mans largely exceeds the average English man's contempt for " niggers." The Brah mans have been longer than the English in South India, and unlike them have contrived to make themselves at home there. But strangers they are, and strangers they will ever be, in the midst of an alien, despised, and wholly unsympathetic population. The Indians of Madras have no laws writien or unwritten; but each tribe, each caste, each family has a few superstitious observ ances of its own, which serve to mark it off from other bodies and maintain its segrega tion; whilst the ordinary affairs of life are regulated by the very vague and shadowy thing known as "custom," the knowledge of which is believed to reside in the hearts of chiefs, priests, and elders. Any act or course of conduct declared to be opposed to this "custom" is believed by all Indians to be necessarily improper and culpable; whilst
any act or course of conduct that accords with custom, they hold to be proper and laud able. In order to correct this rude and primitive folk, to stimulate its consciousness, and to enlarge its understanding, the Legislature has enacted the Indian Penal Code, a law which punishes offences with great severity, and is so minutely comprehensive in its terms that one or other of its provisions may be used against a man for almost any conceivable act or forbearance of a doubtful complexion. Thus a thief who has once before been con victed of theft may be transported for life; adultery makes a man liable to five years' vigorous imprisonment; and defamation of the most trivial character may lead to very serious penal consequences. Landowners often are imprisoned for innocently asserting their right to plough a field. Manifestly a law of this kind would be a dangerous machine if worked by a clever, capable, and conscientious stipendiary magis trate in New York, under the eye of watch ful newspaper reporters. What must it not be in the Madras Province, where it is worked in private by ignorant Brahmans, who for the most part have not realized in the very slight est degree the idea of moral responsibility? The following is the mode in which the criminal law is administered there. The prov ince is divided into some twenty districts. Each district comprises some six, seven, or eight thousand or more square miles, and has its own courts for the determination of all causes, whether civil or criminal, that may arise within their limits. Chief among them is the district and sessions court, presided over limitedby civil a European and criminal judge,jurisdiction, clothed withboth un. original and appellate, a sort of supreme court of judicature for the district. Next in grade
