ordinary too. A Government Commissioner was accordingly appointed, armed with unshackled and all but dictatorial irresponsible powers,—exempt alike from the interposition of ordinary forms of law and the jurisdiction of ordinary Judges and Magistrates. The appointment was not long in justifying the administrative wisdom which suggested it. Sooner than any one dared venture to hazard a conjecture on the subject, was the veil of hitherto impenetrable secrecy completely lifted up, and a system of cold-blooded atrocity revealed in its varied details which filled all Christendom with astonishment and horror. And, under the energetic and persevering efforts of Col. Sleeman and his able assistants, was the axe of retributive justice and ultimate destruction effectually laid at the roots of this worse than Upas tree of Thuggeeism.
Taking a survey of the physical sufferings of a sorely stricken and oppressed people, the Governor-General was led to reflect how largely many of these sufferings must be aggravated by the nostrums, formulisms, and quackeries practised by swarms of native practitioners, or would-be-professors of the Hygeian art. He felt how great a temporal boon would be conferred by the rearing of a superior class of men, released from the medical cabalisms of decrepit Asia, and endowed with the enlightened science of manly Europe. But who, in these present days of realized plans and visible progress, can adequately estimate or comprehend the nature and amount of the difficulties that stood, like so many unscaleable bluff rocks, in the way? The prejudices of the natives were known to be great; and they were studiously magnified and pronounced to be insuperable. The touch of a dead body—though it were that of the nearest and dearest friend—at any time is pollution, involving heavy penalties in the way of ceremonial observances for its removal. But the touch of a dead body, which may have been the tenement of one of another caste, or of an unclean person of no caste at all—why, the very thought of such a thing was sure to lacerate the tenderest feelings of the native mind! But, great as were the real or supposed prejudices of the natives, the prejudices of the learned European Orientalists, relative to this point, were, if possible, still greater, because more elaborately unreasonable. With them it was a foregone conclusion. They had finally made up their minds on the subject. Under the transformative influences of these sunny climes, or the subtilizing effects of an antediluvian logic, or the magical spell of Orient manners, customs, and habits, they at length were reasoned, or seasoned, or magnetized into the thorough persuasion that the difficulties were not only presently insurmountable, but prospectively irre-
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