Arthur Griffiths

“ The cruelty shown to witnesses as well as culprits is a distinct blot on the administration of justice in China. The penal code is ferocious, the punishments inflicted are fiendishly cruel, and the prisons’ pig-stys in which torture is hardly more deadly than the diseases engendered by the most abominable neglect. The commonest notions of justice and fair play are continually ignored. The story is told of a wretched old man who had been detained years 206 in the filthy prison of Peking, dragging out a weary existence in the company of criminals of the worst description. ”

“ This man’s chief crime was that he had been a creature of Khander Rao’s.
The new Gaekwar’s victims were so numerous that it was a current phrase in the city, “Has he killed many to-day?” He spared no man in his anger, no woman in his lust. Justice was bought and sold, the claimant who had the longest purse always won his case; public business was neglected; the most unworthy were advanced; bribery and corruption were the rule in every branch of administration. The crown and finish to Mulhar Rao’s offences was his alleged plot to poison the British resident, Colonel Phayre. ”

“ It would be impossible to conceive a more ghastly sight than that row of naked, trembling convicts as the warders now ranged them in the vault-like den to be counted. The dim light of oil-lanterns fell upon upturned faces, before repulsive enough, but now positively startling in their hideous disfigurement of dust and clotting blood. Every man was streaming with blood from wounds about the head, more or less severe, for the convicts had fought with the desperation of men to whom success meant liberty. ”

“ There is no systematic carelessness as to the circumstances of the prisoner, no niggardly disregard of his natural wants; he is not left to starve of cold or hunger or to live on the charity of individuals; he is not left in filth and stench to sink under disease without an attempt to cure him; he is not able to bribe his gaoler in order to obtain the necessaries which the law allows him. With us in England, the second stage of prison reform seems to be nearly the present state of prison discipline in India. ”

“ The people of Egypt not only paid taxes, but their possessions were seized ruthlessly, their lands misappropriated, their cattle and goods confiscated; they were mere slaves whose right to work on their own account was forfeited; and the whole population was driven forth from their villages with whips, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, under the iniquitous system of enforced labour, to make roads through the Khedive’s estates, till the cotton fields and build embankments to control the distribution of the life-giving Nile. ”

“ All convicts seem to acquire that look of low, half-defiant cunning from their associates, and a physiognomist would not hesitate to describe nine-tenths of the men before us as bad characters if he saw them in any society. Many of this gang are Dacoits, and their breasts, arms and necks are picture galleries of tattooed devices, fondly cherished by the owners as charms against death or capture. ”

“ Thus the mother or aunt of Hung Sow-tsuen, the leader of the Taiping rebellion, died after an imprisonment of several years in the prison of the Nam-hoi magistrate at Canton. The unoffending old woman grievously felt this long detention for no crime or offence of her own. Should the crime of the fugitive be a very aggravated and serious one, such, for example, as an attempt upon the life of the sovereign of the empire, it is not unusual to put the immediate, although perfectly innocent, relations of the offender to death, while those who are not so nearly related to him are sent into exile. ”

“ The sentence to slavery extended to all a man’s belongings and to his descendants forever. Capital punishment was performed by decapitation, and a fiendish executioner often prolonged the agony of the condemned convict. To throw a victim to be devoured by wild beasts or trodden to death by elephants was a practice only surrendered in recent times. ”

“ There is no prison costume. A prisoner wears what he likes, eats what he likes, and spends his time as he likes, within the limits of the prison. There is no pretence of reform. The prisoners live idle, useless lives. Though, according to law, a prisoner may work if he desires, in fact, work is not encouraged because of the disputes likely to arise over the sale of his product, and hardly one per cent. ”

“ A visit to Tourah is both interesting and instructive. The chief employment of the convicts is in the quarries, a couple of miles from the prison, to which the gangs proceed every morning at daylight and where they remain every day of the week but Friday, which is their Sabbath, until four o’clock in the afternoon. There is no time wasted in marching to and fro. The dinner, or midday meal, is carried out to the quarries by the cooks, and after it is eaten the convicts are allowed an hour’s rest in such shade as can be found in the nearly blinding heat of the dazzling white quarries. ”

“ At last the head-superintendent of the Bombay prison heard that Sheik Kassam’s disciplinary system consisted in his bringing the most dangerous of the Chinamen and Malays quietly into his back-yard from the adjoining garden, and there regaling them with plenty of sweetmeats, sugar, drink in moderate quantity, and adding even the joys of female society of a peculiar sort. If any one became unruly or saucy, he was liable to get a dozen lashes, but if they behaved decently they all had their little festivals with regularity. ”

“ There must be something very tempting to the untutored mind—and many of these Tourah convicts are half-wild creatures, Bedouins of the desert or the lowest scum of the cities—in the seeming freedom of their condition during so many hours of the day. Liberty seems within easy reach. Not a mile from the quarries are great overhanging cliffs, honey-combed with caves, deep, cavernous recesses affording secure hiding places, and it is for these that the rush is made. ”

“ When England’s work in India is reviewed in the time to come, full credit must be given to the humane administration which sternly suppressed the atrocious malpractices that so long afflicted the land, such as “Suttee,” or the burning of widows on the funeral pyre; the human sacrifices to the bloodthirsty idol of Jagannath; “Thuggee,” that vile organisation for secret murder which devastated 48 the entire continent and killed so many unsuspecting victims. No more terrible and widespread crime has obtained in any age or country. ”

“ It is as true of crime in the Orient as of other habits, customs and beliefs of the East, that what has descended from generation to generation and become not only a tradition but an established fact, is accepted as such by the people, who display only a passive indifference to deeds of cruelty and violence. Each country has its own peculiar classes of hereditary criminals, and the influence of tradition and long established custom has made the eradication of such crimes a difficult matter. ”

“ The Thugs gave free vent to some of the worst passions of perverse humanity; they were treacherous, 71 underhanded, pitiless to those they deemed their legitimate prey. But yet they were seldom guilty of wanton cruelty; the pain they inflicted was only that caused by depriving a human being of life. It was a rule with them never to murder women, and they generally spared infant children whom they adopted, bringing them up in their traditions. Even if a woman was doomed to suffer she was most scrupulously preserved from insult beforehand, either by act or word. ”

“ During the hours of labour, ceaseless activity is the rule; all around the picks resound upon the unyielding stone; some are busy with the levers raising huge blocks, stimulated by the sing-song, monotonous chant, without which Arabs, like sailors, cannot work with any effect. ”

“ Any weapon would serve to give effect to the homicidal frenzy; sometimes it was a rice pounder, sometimes a wooden crutch, sometimes an axe for cutting firewood, sometimes a heavy mallet used in wool-teasing. The convicts were known to commit the capital offence in order to draw down the death penalty when they were tired of life from long brooding over fancied unjust treatment. Sentence of death by hanging was the invariable requital of murder when clearly proved, and it was passed by a sessions’ judge, subject to subsequent confirmation by a court of reference. ”

“ Thus each large prison in Canton has a governor, twenty-four turnkeys, thirty-seven watchmen and fifteen spearmen. In a barrack beyond the doors or gates of each prison is a resident guard of soldiers. The turnkeys, watchmen, spearmen, and so forth, become the most casehardened and incorrigible of the criminals from the great amount of misery which they daily witness. The policemen who are attached to the yamun are also men of vile character, and it is unfortunately too common for them to share the booty with the thief and hoodwink or deceive the magistrate. ”

“ The Dacoits were close at hand, in the very village, and might be easily seized, but no one would give information, as that would be deemed an unpardonable offence. To betray an offender into the hands of justice is a sin against religion much more than against morality. There is the utmost difficulty, therefore, in tracing crime in Burmah. British police officers were driven to death in ceaseless efforts to catch Dacoits, hunting them perpetually for months and months and seldom, if ever, laying hands on a single offender. ”

“ No European country can show anything like the immunity from crime which the worst district in Orissa enjoys. In Balasor, the proportion of persons in gaol is one to every 3,375 of the population, or one female to every 121,278 of the population. Puri district, however, the seat of the so-called “abominations of Jagannath,” would blush to own such an overwhelming criminal population. Including both the central and the subdivisional gaols, the 41 proportion is one criminal always in prison to every six thousand of the population and one woman to every hundred thousand. ”

“ We came to a separate cell, the inmate of which was a loose-jointed, misshapen, weak-looking, thin-faced native man, apparently about twenty-five years of age, though he might, for anything one could judge, have been any age from eighteen to forty. ‘That,’ said the governor, ‘was one of the most daring and relentless Dacoits we have ever had.’ In a cell a few yards distant, there was a grave and venerable looking old man who had attained the very highest grade in a different profession—that of a forger. ”

“ One boy was detained in prison until grown up in the hope that he would prove well-conducted. All his relations had been Thugs; his father (who had been executed) , his uncles, brothers and forebears for several generations, and numbers of them had suffered the extreme penalty. He was cognisant of their misdeeds and the retribution that overtook them, but his own inclinations lay the same way, and no sooner was he at large than he embraced the evil trade and was soon known as a jemadar with an increasing reputation as a daring leader of Dacoits. ”

“ As a rule, the people of India are law abiding, orderly and sober in character, but there is an inherent deceitfulness in them that tends to interfere with the course of justice. This is constantly seen in the untrustworthy evidence so often given in court. ”