Note 25 — Chapter II · INFERENCES FROM FACTS.

Miss Nightingale (The People of India, in “Nineteenth Century” for August, 1878) gives instances, which she says represent millions of cases, of the state of peonage to which the cultivators of Southern India have been reduced through the facilities afforded by the Civil Courts to the frauds and oppressions of money lenders and minor native officials. “Our Civil Courts are regarded as institutions for enabling the rich to grind the faces of the poor, and many are fain to seek a refuge from their jurisdiction within native territory,” says Sir David Wedderburn, in an article on Protected Princes in India, in a previous (July) number of the same magazine, in which he also gives a native State, where taxation is comparatively light, as an instance of the most prosperous population of India.