‘I think’, said Omar, ’that I see before me a man whom God would not make the means of disgracing one of the companions of the holy prophet.’

Zaid then described circumstantially the most unequivocal position that was, perhaps, ever described in a public court of justice; but, still hesitating to swear to the entire completion of the crime, the criminals were acquitted, and his brother and the two others received the punishment described.  This decision of the Brutus of his age and country settled the law of evidence in these matters; and no Muhammadan judge would now give a verdict against any person charged with adultery, without the four witnesses to the entire fact.  No man hopes for a conviction for this crime in our courts; and, as he would have to drag his wife or paramour through no less than three—­ that of the police officer, the magistrate, and the judge—­to seek it, he has recourse to poison, either secretly or with his wife’s consent.  She will commonly rather die than be turned out into the streets a degraded outcast.  The seducer escapes with impunity, while his victim suffers all that human nature is capable of enduring.  Where husbands are in the habit of poisoning their guilty wives from the want of legal means of redress, they will sometimes poison those who are suspected upon insufficient grounds.  No magistrate ever hopes to get a conviction in the judge’s court, if he commits a criminal for trial on this charge (under Regulation 17 of 1817), and, therefore, he never does commit.  Regulation 7 of 1819 authorizes a magistrate to punish any person convicted of enticing away a wife or unmarried daughter for another’s use; and an indignant functionary may sometimes feel disposed to stretch a point that the guilty man may not altogether escape.[10]

Redress for these wrongs is never sought in our courts, because they can never hope to get it.  But it is a great mistake to suppose that the people of India want a heavier punishment for the crime than we are disposed to inflict—­all they want is a fair chance of conviction upon such reasonable proof as cases of this nature admit of, and such a measure of punishment as shall make it appear that their rulers think the crime a serious one, and that they are disposed to protect them from it.  Sometimes the poorest man would refuse pecuniary compensation; but generally husbands of the poorer classes would be glad to get what the heads of their caste or circle of society might consider the expenses of a second marriage.  They do not dare to live in adultery, they would be outcasts if they did; they must be married according to the forms of their caste, and it is reasonable that the seducer of the wife should be obliged to defray the coats of the injured husband’s second marriage.  The rich will, of course, always refuse such a compensation, but a law declaring the man convicted of this crime liable to imprisonment in irons at hard labour for two years, but entitled to his discharge within that