more difficult to get the truth in any case.  They have no fear of punishment, because all charges against them for fraud, falsehood, or violation of the rules laid down by Government have to be submitted either to a court-martial, composed of native officers, or to the Governor-General.  Both involve endless trouble, and it would, I fear, be impossible to get a conviction before a court-martial so composed.  No Resident will ever submit to a Governor-General the scores of flagrant cases that every month come before him; still less will he worry unoffending and suffering people by causing them to be summoned to give evidence before a military court.

In a recent instance (July 1851), a sipahee in a regiment stationed at Lucknow was charged before a court-martial with three abuses of the privilege.  He required no less than seventy-four witnesses to be summoned in his defence.  The Court had to wait till what could be got out of the seventy-four appeared, and the man became an object of sympathy, because he was kept so long in arrest.  He named the first Assistant to the Resident, who has charge of the Sipahee Petition Department, as a witness; and he was not, in consequence, permitted to attend the Court on the part of the Resident, who preferred the charges, though he was never called or examined by the Court on the part of the defence.  The naming him, and the summoning of so many witnesses were mere ruses on the part of the sipahee to escape.  No person on the part of the Resident was allowed to attend the Court and see that his witnesses were examined; nor had he any means of knowing whether they were or not.  He had reason to believe that the most important were not.  The sipahee was of course acquitted, as sipahees charged with such abuses of the privilege always will be.  This man’s regiment was at Lucknow, and near the place where the cause of action arose, his own village, and the Resident’s office.  How much more difficult would it be to get a conviction against a sipahee whose regiment happens to be many hundred miles off!

The transfer of their lands from the jurisdiction of the local authorities to that of the Hozoor Tehseel is often the cause of much suffering to their copartners and neighbours.  Their co-sharers in the land often find much inconvenience from it, and apprehend that, sooner or later, the influence of the sipahee will enable him to add their shares to his own.  The village so transferred, being removed from the observation and responsibility of the local authorities, often becomes a safe refuge for the bad characters of the district, who thence depredate upon the country around with impunity.  Claims to villages, to which the claimant had really no right whatever, have been successfully prosecuted by or through sipahees, for the sole purpose of having them transferred to the Hozoor Tehseel, and made dens of thieves and highway robbers.  The person in charge of the Hozool Tehseel villages has generally a good deal of influence at