The town of Datiya contains a population of between forty and fifty thousand souls.  The streets are narrow, for, in buildings, as in dress, the Raja allows every man to consult his own inclinations.  There are, however, a great many excellent houses in Datiya, and the appearance of the place is altogether very good.  Many of his feudatory chiefs reside occasionally in the city, and have all their establishments with them, a practice which does not, I believe, prevail anywhere else among these Bundelkhand chiefs, and this makes the capital much larger, handsomer, and more populous than that of Tehri.  This indicates more of mutual confidence between the chief and his vassals, and accords well with the character they bear in the surrounding countries.  Some of the houses occupied by these barons are very pretty.  They spend the revenue of their distant estates in adorning them, and embellishing the capital, which they certainly could not have ventured to do under the late Rajas of Tehri, and may not possibly be able to do under the future Rajas of Datiya.  The present minister of Datiya, Ganesh, is a very great knave, and encourages the residence upon his master’s estate of all kinds of thieves and robbers, who bring back from distant districts every season vast quantities of booty, which they share with him.  The chief himself is a mild old gentleman, who would not suffer violence to be offered to any of his nobles, though he would not, perhaps, quarrel with his minister for getting him a little addition to his revenue from without, by affording a sanctuary to such kind of people.  As in Tehri, so here, the pickpockets constitute the entire population of several villages, and carry their depredations northward to the banks of the Indus, and southward to Bombay and Madras.[10] But colonies of thieves and robbers like these abound no less in our own territories than in those of native states.  There are more than a thousand families of them in the districts of Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, and Meerut in the Upper Doab,[11] all well enough known to the local authorities, who can do nothing with them.

They extend their depredations into remote districts, and the booty they bring home with them they share liberally with the native police and landholders under whose protection they live.  Many landholders and police officers make large fortunes from the share they get of this booty.  Magistrates do not molest them, because they would despair of ever finding the proprietors of the property that might be found upon them; and, if they could trace them, they would never be able to persuade them to come and ’enter upon a worse sea of troubles’ in prosecuting them.  These thieves and robbers of the professional classes, who have the sagacity to avoid plundering near home, are always just as secure in our best regulated districts as they are in the worst native states, from the only three things which such depredators care about—­the penal laws, the odium of