December_ 22, 1849.—­Sultanpoor, eight miles.  Recrossed the Goomtee river, close under the Cantonments, over a bridge of boats prepared for the purpose, and encamped on the parade-ground.  The country over which we came was fertile and well cultivated.  For some days we have seen and heard a good many religions mendicants, both Mahommedans and Hindoos, but still very few lame, blind, and otherwise helpless persons, asking charity.  The most numerous and distressing class of beggars that importune me, are those who beg redress for their wrongs, and a remedy for their grievances,—­“their name, indeed, is Legion,” and their wrongs and grievances are altogether without remedy, under the present government and inveterately vicious system of administration.  It is painful to listen to all these complaints, and to have to refer the sufferers for redress to authorities who want both the power and the will to afford it; especially when one knows that a remedy for almost every evil is hoped for from a visit such as the poor people are now receiving from the Resident.  He is expected “to wipe the tears from off all faces;” and feels that he can wipe them from hardly any.  The reckless disregard shown by the depredators of all classes and degrees to the sufferings of their victims, whatever be the cause of discontent or object of pursuit, is lamentable.  I have every day scores of petitions delivered to me “with quivering lip and tearful eye,” by persons who have been plundered of all they possessed, had their dearest relatives murdered or tortured to death, and their habitations burnt to the ground, by gangs of ruffians, under landlords of high birth and pretensions, whom they had never wronged or offended; some, merely because they happened to have property, which the ruffians wished to take—­others, because they presumed to live and labour upon lands which they coveted, or deserted, and wished to have left waste.  In these attacks, neither age, nor sex, nor condition are spared.  The greater part of the leaders of these gangs of ruffians are Rajpoot landholders, boasting descent from the sun and moon, or from the demigods, who figure in the Hindoo religious fictions of the Poorans.  There are, however, a great many Mahommedans at the head of similar gangs.  A landholder of whatever degree, who is opposed to his government from whatever cause, considers himself in a state of war’, and he considers a state of war to authorize his doing all those things which he is forbidden to do in a state of peace.

Unless the sufferer happens to be a native officer or sipahee of our army, who enjoys the privilege of urging his claims through the Resident, it is a cruel mockery to refer him for redress to any existing local authority.  One not only feels that it is so, but sees, that the sufferer thinks that he must know it to be so.  No such authority considers it to be any part of his duty to arrest evil-doers, and inquire into and redress wrongs suffered by individuals, or