Licence: In copyright
Credit: India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey. Source: Wellcome Collection.
504/552 page 474
Licence: In copyright
Credit: India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey. Source: Wellcome Collection.
![shall have demonstrated that the rights of princes have no fiYisteneg_ajja.rt fmm_±]ie rights of the people.” In another paper, also referring to the States of Central India, Sir Lepel Griffin wrote as follows :— “ The peasants are little better than serfs. The importation of foreign slaves is prevented by the vigilance of the British authorities alone. Torture is a recognised part of judicial and police procedure. . . . Only a few months ago I was compelled to refuse to return the visit of a ruling chief who was openly accused of squeezing the juice of chillies into the eyes of recusant witnesses. He was an old gentleman of the most soft and courteous manners, and the idea that chillies could be objected to as a means of judicial investigation did not appear to have occurred to him. . . . Administration of justice has virtually no existence; a bribe procures the acquittal, or escape, or release of a criminal. Every offence can usually be compounded for money. Numerous boundary disputes between Native States come before me, and the consideration which governs every case is that both States have, as a matter of course, supported a wilfully exaggerated claim by perjured witnesses and forged documents. One of the first chiefs in India punishes and ruins the headman or cultivator of a village who may give truthful evidence contrary to any boundary claim the State has chosen unjustly to advance. . . . The actual demand of the Government per head of the population is double, treble, or quadruple what it is in British India.” Speaking of Kashmir with personal knowledge, Sir Lepel Griffin said in 1883 that “ nothing escapes taxa- tion, and bare life is all that the State leaves to the cultivator, whose position is harder and as hopeless as that of a slave.” The shameful maladministration of this State was too long tolerated, but at last, in 1889, the patience of the British Government was exhausted. The Maharaja was for a time deprived of all authority, and although he was subsequently allowed to resume his position as head of the State, it was under new conditions, the administration being carried on by a](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29351339_0504.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
