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Untitled Article
grees of guilt among his countrymen , which have been : originated by British misgovern meat ; but when the cause can best be served by a plain statement of facts , he can adduce them with all the calmness of a mere observer . That which it makes our spirits sink to read / he states unaccompanied by reproach or entreaty . Suggestions on which we would stake our lives , and which we should be apt to thrust in the face of friend and foe , he offers in
their due connexion , and with a moderation most likely to en « - sure them a hearing . The facts we refer to , relate partly to the impotence , or worse than impotence , of a judicial system which has been much vaunted at home , while it was the scourge of those whom it assumed to protect . Under this system , thousands of innocent lives have been
taken away , the tenure of property has been perverted ) favour has been obtained by the artful , and justice denied to the oppressed ; and much of this , while the officers of the law were wholly unconscious what mischief they were doing ; or , at best , only sensible that much was going wrong , whieh they had no power to set right . They have found perjury and forgery perpetually on the increase , and were aware that these erimes arose from the
faulty administration of the laws ; but could only go on , as long as they remained in office , to increase the evil . It seems next to impossible that justice should be done * where judges and other officers of the law use one language , and their clients another . The difficulty is increased when a third language
is appointed to be used in law transactions . The Persian language is used in the Indian courts . This being foreign to judge , witnesses , and contending parties , no one , it is true , can have an advantage over the rest ; but how they are , with reasonable time and pains , to get at an understanding of the matter in hand , it is difficult to say . The experiment has never been tried . Of time .
indeed , there would seem to be no lack , since causes drag on from month to month , and from year to year ; but , as to pains-taking , there can be little where the quantity of work to be done is out of all proportion to the machinery prepared to dispatch it . There are but six provincial courts in the presidency of Bengal ; and elsewhere amidst these vast territories ^ plaees of appeal are so thinly scattered , that the comparatively small nqmber who can apply for justice constitute a crowd , out of which only a select few may < Xm m , mm V H MM m a & W **
^ hope to obtaiu it . The most injured are least able to appeal ; and therefore they sit down at home to starve , despairing of redress , and bitterly smiling at the name of justice , to them but a mockery . Their less indigent neighbours travel great distances to lodge their complaints , and then are at the mercjr of native ' officers , who are responsible only to the judge , whtQ does not ; understand half of what ia brought before him * and is wholly irresponsible for the dice barge of his duty . The inferior officers of the court may ~* j * ort with their clients as they like j the tiatlve ptebtler * r * my
Untitled Article
610 Rajah Rammekwi Roy on the
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1832, page 610, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1820/page/34/
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