he must necessarily refer to numerous passages upon the various points included in the indictment. The learned Counsel then read from the Nil Durpan itself a large number of passages in which, as he showed, most serious and disgraceful, libels were perpetrated against a particular class, who, as he would prove by the evidence he should lay before them, could be none other in intention of their reverend traducer than the Indigo planters. He read numerous passages, appealed not to their feeling, but to their reason on the libellous matters which he thus read to them, charging upon the Indigo planters every variety of crime held most abhorred amongst all civilised men, and which he had already detailed to them. The avowed object of the Nil Durpan was to describe certain states of society. Was it nothing with such an avowed object to represent, under the fictitious names of Wood and Rose, the whole body of planters? The story of the book commenced with the picture of a once happy valley,—happy in the production of rice, grain, pulse, seeds, oil, and fish. The women, simple-minded and happy in their allegiance to their husbands; the ryots happy; no evil to complain of; the ryots' daughters virtuous and therefore happy. But alas, a change came over the spirit of their dream; the Indigo monster arrives. In the short period of three years, indebtedness, starvation, neglected fields, imprisonment, forgery, attempted violation, murder, sudden death, and suicide came on the scene. The virtue of the Bengalee, his women, and his ryots, remain unchanged until the closing scene, when death, in some shape or another, puts an end to all their sufferings. But how is this brought about; by swarms of Mahratta horsemen? By hordes of Tartars? By locusts? By fire or flood, or some like calamity? No, but by means of the introduction of the Indigo monsters, represented by the dramatis personae, Wood and Rose. Bengalee dewans, once pure, are converted into demons; ameens, once harmless, become tigers; magistrates, supposed to be just, are converted into oppressors. The planter's wife!—and here he felt that he was no longer the mere Counsel—he was the Englihman pursuing with a righteous indignation the libeller who had dared to cast the deepest stain upon the fair fame of his country women, whom before the world he had assiduously represented as the means of satisfying the lust of the Justice, for the purpose of making him the tool of the planter. The ever-virtuous
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